It’s funny how our convictions shift. My journey to Kenya (most journeys actually) started with mixed emotions. Since my youth, and definitely since my turn to Christ, I have felt a sharp conviction to follow Christ’s command to go make disciples. My chronic interest in international peoples and travel have led me (along with my family) to investigate serving the Lord internationally. And yet, I distinctly remember, in the early days of my walk with the Lord, specifically requesting that I be excluded from service in Africa. Should have requested Hawaii, I suppose.
After receiving what has clearly shown itself to be God’s call to go to Kenya’s Rift Valley Academy, however, I have undergone some interesting changes in thought. Initially, if I am being honest, my heart wrestled with this lie, “I don’t really want to go to Africa, but God’s probably going to send me there! That’s just how he is.”
I think I viewed God as a kind of missional dispatcher, sending his servants out like New York cab drivers to whatever nasty neighborhood that needed service, and not certainly to where the poor servant wanted to go! The simple fact that Laurel and I were sensing a call to RVA proved that in order to serve, you had to serve where you’d rather not be. To truly serve God is to suffer, right?
And yet, God clearly knows me much better than I do myself. Now I am experiencing a new and unique twist in my persisting negativism, “Now I really want to go, and God’s probably not going to send me. That’s just how He is.” The irony is, of course, that God is sending me not only exactly where He wants me, but ultimately, to exactly where I want to be! Even if I never get to go . . . excuse me?!
God can transform even the most stubborn, confused, irrational, oppositional hearts into ones that desperately crave His love, His leading, His discipline, His testing, and His grace. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (2 Corinthians 5:17) But the old is slow to go! I still think I know what I want – what is funny is that God still knows better! Even if I think I know what I want, where I want to go, what I want to do – God, in his mercy, is patient and leads me out of the darkness of my own kingdom into His perfect one. I’d rather be there, truthfully, and it is only fear that fools me into thinking otherwise. But God’s got that one on his to do list too, I imagine!
