Am I Doing This Right?

1/18/19

          I’m not quite sure how I survived the past month (ish) of my life. I’m not here to be dramatic, I’m here to be honest and in complete honesty when I look back on the past several weeks I wanted to quit SO. MANY. TIMES. I was told by a loving friend that “your journeyman term will be a time where God does SO much, but the biggest thing He will do is make you more like Christ, and that is very painful.” I realized that in order to become more like Christ, all of me, all of Meghan, has to be completely washed away. Not in a “I’m giving up all of my personality and entering a cult” way, but in a “wow, I am super sinful and need all of Jesus to fill all of me” kind of way. 

I’ve learned so much about myself as a person, I had never put much thought into who I am or more accurately who He made me to be, but now I am more self-aware than ever before. This self-awareness has shown me that God has given me a very distinct personality with unique gifts and also unique shortcomings. I’ve learned that I value certain things, things I didn’t think twice about in America. I also learned that I dislike things! There are things I just simply do not want to do, be, say, or become and that’s ok! The beauty about this self-awareness is that I know I’ve been given the freedom to be the “Meghan” God had in mind as he knit me together (Psalm 139), That isn’t to say that I can do whatever I want and be whatever I want based on my own opinions. Clearly, I will learn more about myself as I read more of His word and learn more about Him since HE created me in the first place and He knows me better than I could ever know myself. 

I’ve also learned that I actually have NO IDEA how to be a “missionary”! How silly that sounds, but it’s really, really, REALLY true! I’ve experienced the short term thing, I even got a little crazy and spent 10 weeks overseas (wow, high five Meghan!), but this is a completely different world. There’s something about living, actually living in a place that changes ministry. I actually have to pay bills, figure out health insurance, wash my clothes and dry them at the laundromat, cook meals, and buy cleaning products (hopefully the right ones)... things you never do on a short term trip. I have to make friends, invest in my team, figure out how to communicate, and somehow stay in contact with my family/friends back home. I have to sweep, and memorize train timetables, reroute myself when I get on the wrong train, and figure out how to get 24 eggs home on my bicycle without ALL of them cracking. I have to have down time, rest, exercise, and oh yeah... READ MY BIBLE! 

This. Is. Real. Life. This is not some fun 10 week adventure. This is an everyday-waking up-dying to self-how will I survive daily adventure. Every morning as soon as my eyes open my heart has the opportunity to be hardened toward God, simply because I’m a sinner and the only way to combat that is to force my sinful heart to spend hours reading His Word and slowly The Word, Jesus himself, chips away at that hard heart and starts the molding, carving, pruning process of another day. Every single day it hurts and every single day I get to choose to complain or be grateful. Every single day I choose between two things: grabbing His hand and like a little child running to keep up with what He is doing that day or closing myself off because “I just can’t today.” Most days His Holy Spirit somehow sustains me (as if I should be shocked by this) but some days I fail, and I go to bed thinking “He chose the worst person for this, the wrong person for this.” And I go to bed waiting to wake up to new mercies. 

Maybe none of this made sense but maybe it gives a glimpse into how, every day we live a life in a world where we are foreigners because we were made for Heaven and not for here. And just because you may not be planted in some foreign country, it doesn’t mean you’re exempt from the call of Christ (and the pain and glory that comes along with it). God is good, and we aren’t worthy of His goodness, especially Meghan Marie... she REALLY isn’t worthy.So maybe I'm not doing it right, but I pray every single day that He will show me how to just not do it completely wrong. But for some reason He loves me and somehow I made it another month! 

         

Dying Alive

I sat there, sipping my tea, with the Word in front of me discussing Ecclesiastes with my sisters. We shared laughs and struggles and everything in between as I for just a moment forgot where I was. Until we began to read together and my heart was reminded once again of why I’m here...

“We all come to the end of our lives as naked and empty-handed as on the day we were born. We can’t take our riches with us.”

Ecclesiastes 5:15 

This reality is not something that should be new to us. Death happens and we do not get to take anything with us. But this verse was written by a man with a pre-Christ mindset. Yet I’m reading it with Christ’s Spirit inside of me. This writer knew that he would be dying in death, just as he entered this world full of sin, he would leave the world full of sin. Yet, here I sit reading this same verse with the resurrected Christ as my advocate and his spirit living inside of me. When our time comes as believers, we die alive. 

That’s when His Spirit whispered to me, “Meghan look past your table, these precious people will die in death while you will die alive.” I will not take anything with me, but nothing this world offers can compare with what I’m heading towards. HIS GLORY, is what awaits us! Yet, my neighbors and friends here in this country do not have that hope. 

So quickly he pulls me from the pit of “normalcy” and reminds me of why I’m here. It’s easy to have a schedule and begin to live a normal life, yet I can easily forget that my eternity is secure, while most of the people I walk past everyday have never heard about the eternity they could have. Nor have they heard about the reason I desire that eternity, because of HIM. 

Oh, Father let me never forget how undeserving I am of your mercy and how great your love is for those who have not heard.