I came to missions in Southeast Asia for a year because I believed in God's passionate love for His people – the lost, the weak, the oppressed, and the hungry. Before I left for missions, God revealed Himself to be mighty and powerful, who is passionate and unfettered in His love for me, from the day I was born and through His faithfulness in each season of my life.
I realize more and more that while my God is zealous in His role as my lover, He is also a Father who disciplines out of love. I thought life would be different and I would change to this ideal holy type I imagined, quite different from the purposeless of my 40-hour, 8 to 5 office job or not as secluded as my college days in my bubble. I believed missions was the goal to achieve holiness and save the world, but now I realize each day that missions, ministry, family, job, eating and wherever it is and whatever it may be, is ultimately a means – the means to not become who I want to be, but to look upon Christ and be delighted in Him. My missions, relationships and life itself is a form of worship to bring Him glory. And that glory is supreme when I am delighted in Him.
But it's hard to be delighted when in the field I still feel lonely and purposeless. It's hard to believe that some of the seeds planted will take fruit and keep faith, to trust and fully submit. Sometimes it's not what I had expected but it's what God is still doing when I die so He may live. It is difficult to cling to faith, whether here or when darkness seems readily encroaching on your daily life and insecurity is always ready to attack everything I do. But sometimes God disciplines the parts in us we NEED more than we WANT– more than showing me the blazing fiery crazy love I knew and wanted, He is showing me the power of commitment. That His love is not only power, but the power comes from full submission and humility. That commitment is the key – when all feelings, legitimacy and logic for staying disappears. Sometimes it seems it'll never end – the injustices of children being sold by their own parents, blatant poverty and corruption, and the seemingly never-ending spiritual darkness infiltrated into the personal and governmental but that is Christ's love for me. I've fallen short every day and yet it amazes me that He could still love me, that such a grace exists and is faithful. His grace reveals itself new each morning and I want to receive that love and who that constancy to the hopeless and broken. Because that is what I am.
Love is commitment.