God's will and change.

July 24, 2007

God, a common theme of this trip has been humility. As I share this morning from Obadiah, grant me the humility that you ask of your people. Let me not be like Edom, who was prideful and walked in the direct distance of you but let me walk by your side and understand you for who you are!

Yesterday was probably the hardest day for me to handle. It was a day that had many fun parts to it. One of those parts was team cohesiveness. Getting to the end of a missions trip and having two days of tourism tends to take the focus off of the people around me and put the focus on me. I don’t know that this is healthy for group cohesiveness or dynamics. God is faithful though. He gave us opportunities to work with each other and work with other people around us. Last night, a father of one of the boys at sports camp was standing in the lobby of the hotel. He said he had spent hours trying to find us and that he really needed to talk to us. Daniel is the student’s name. He is going to go with us today to the zoo. God make us a light unto the world and a light unto each other. You are gracious and compassionate and your name and renown are the desire of our hearts!

I am excited about coming home. I am scared to come home. There will be a flood of materialism that grabs ahold of me when I make it home and so I am worried about how this will affect me. Culture shock may run rampant on the way back into the country worse than it was coming out of the country. I know that God is working in my heart and challenging me with truths from his word and I am excited about that. When he challenges my life with truth, this means that he asks me to change my life in a drastic way. This will be hard and I will struggle to do it but it will be good to. It will be something that I feel I must do. I’m not sure the exact details yet but I know that God has called me to be passionate about his word with people. He wants all of us to be students of him. He wants us to call him “Teacher” which had a very different meaning when he walked the earth! He invites us to “come and see” who he is and why we would follow him. I am so excited to see God work in my life and in my family in the next couple of months.

God grant me peace and wisdom as I head home. Let me be a light in the darkness for you and let me know the power that you have for us in your word! God make me a student of who you are and what you want in our lives. Let me change according to your purposes and plans that you have for me. In your name I pray ALL of these things…

By the way, we get on a plane this afternoon. Crazy…This trip went fast.