“As long as I consider my personal
temperament and think about what I am fitted for, I shall never hear
the call of God. But when I am brought into relationship with God, I
am in the condition Isaiah was in. Isaiah’s soul was to attuned to
God by the tremendous crisis he had gone through that he recorded the
call of God to his amazed soul. The majority of us have no ear for
anything but ourselves, we cannot hear a thing God says. To be
brought into the zone of the call of God is to be profoundly
altered.”
– My Utmost for His Highest
(Jan 16th) by Oswald Chambers
Life in Uganda has been challenging to
say the least. Not in a ‘ministry is hard’ or ‘I’m tired’
sense but hard in a way that has stripped me down to bare bones and
has put me in a mindset focused mainly on surviving. Our team here
has had big ups and big downs and everything from our ministry to our
daily routine completely lacks consistency, which I have come to
realize is very important to me. Yesterday I hit bottom, the lowest
I have probably been in 6 years, and I was forced to take a good long
look at myself and I did not like what I saw. I realized that while
living in this ‘survival mode’ I had slowly backed away from
everyone… I guess I figured it would be safer to keep myself
separate from the inconsistency and to simply place myself at a
distance from everyone and attempt to just remain alone with God. At
home my community is very stable and being in such a tight group that
lacks all stability has been rough on me emotionally. I like when
things are steady, I like when I am steady, and everything about
living in Africa is not. I realized that instead of allowing myself
to be real about how I was feeling I was just trying to be tough.
There was just a shell of myself showing and I was slowly loosing
heart from the inside out. I have been so guarded… living alone
on this island. Today we started a women’s Bible study, and with
the nine girls here I have only really allowed bits and pieces of my
heart to show. Kathleen was going around asking how all of us were
doing and when it came to me I thought for a second as to how I
wanted to respond. The temptation to remain hidden was strong…it
would be so easy to say that “I am doing alright, things are a
little hard but I’ll be fine…” and to keep on trying to sort
everything out on my own. I don’t think anyone would have pushed
for more because I have been so reserved in showing the deep parts of
my heart this far… but when my turn came different words came
pouring out. I found myself admitting that I had distanced myself
from everybody and now that I was alone I was seeing how far away I
felt even from myself. God doesn’t call us to live on an island…
isolated from community and support. He is calling me to be real and
deep with my team in a way that I have been afraid to do since the
beginning of my time in Mexico. He’s calling me to trust that he
is consistent enough for me.
