An Unexpected Return

A month and a half ago, I came back from mission in Asia, after three and a half months. Many different things contributed to our early return, and after a lot of prayer and conversations, I decided not to go back to this particular mission. I still feel deeply called to foreign mission, and am taking some time to rest, then pray and discern where the Lord may be calling me next, for hopefully a longer amount of time.

The view from the roof of our home in Asia

How awkwardly difficult. I wanted to be the kind of missionary that could love Asia, the continent with the least amount of Christians, and a variety of incredibly different cultures. And while I won’t say that I didn’t love it, and that I couldn’t come to love it with time, I do feel very clearly that right now is not the time, and this was not the particular situation, in which the Lord is calling me to be a missionary in Asia. Maybe one day. A different season in my life with a particular kind of grace.

It took a lot in me to make a decision like this. The recognition that God doesn’t always ask me to do the thing that looks the holiest. He is more interesting than that. He is not black and white. He is a God to have a conversation with and not to just assume that I know how He thinks and how He moves. He also knows me intimately. He knows my heart, and how He made it.

I also had to turn down the dial on my personal judgments upon myself. “How could you really know if you’re called to something after only three and a half months?” Or knowing that the person that I was five years ago, would look at my life now and think, “Huh?”

And yet, I also know that I am learning different things now than I did the first time I became a missionary at the age of 21. I’m learning different things than I learned when I first moved to Haiti at the age of 24. I’m thankful to belong to a God who always has new things to teach me. And while He doesn’t change, and His ways don’t change, my understanding of Him hopefully comes to new and deeper places as I grow and change in life. And so my decisions, my ways, may look different than they did five or ten years ago. But isn’t that actually a beautiful and good thing?

The thing that I’m truly learning in this season of my life is that holiness doesn’t actually look anything like I thought it would. It doesn’t follow a diagram, or a pathway exactly mapped out and the same for each person. You can’t check boxes. Listening to the Holy Spirit means listening to the one who was there when the earth was created from nothing, when Jesus rose from the dead, when the apostles were waiting in the Upper Room – He’s unpredictable, not to be put into a box, not to be labeled easily. And so I hope to listen now in this season of my life to the Holy Spirit whose ways don’t always make sense, whose winds blow where they will, who is alive and living in each of our hearts today.

A God who is alive and active is not a God whose ways we can predict. And while sometimes that is scary, today I am thankful that He is always doing a new thing.

“Things never happen the same way twice, dear one.” Aslan to Lucy in Prince Caspian

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