I used to shy away from suffering. My tight grip on control kept me bound in my comfort zone
and pride had me blinded from the beauty of being poor in spirit. But then, our prayers led us here, a place on the map we didn't know existed until we arrived.
We've been living alongside the poorest of the poor, further into the unknown and farther from our comforts than we’ve ever been. Through unspeakable pain and breathtaking joy, it’s in this place that we’ve been living the undoing each day, where everything that needs to break is broken and everything that needs to be shook is shaken. Brought to the ends of the earth and coming to the complete end of ourselves.
There is blessing in losing everything.
There is power in being surrendered for love's sake.
The more I live, the more I'm encountering the Person of love as I deny myself daily and pick up my cross. All of my expectations and failures, all of my fears and absolutes, even all of my efforts and need to be in control are nailed to the finished work of Calvary. Our prayer has always been to live broken and poured out because of what's already been done for us.
Love led us to this part of the world where few people come and even fewer feel called. From where we live to everywhere we go, we're surrounded by Jesus in disguise- in the fatherless and the orphan, the widow and the prisoner, the contrite and the sick. I’m learning that it’s one thing to sing songs of surrender comfortably within the four walls of an air conditioned building, with impressive lights and pretty voices- but it’s another thing completely to live the song in the hospitals, prisons and villages. Everyday I'm praying that the distance between the words I sing and the way I live gets smaller and smaller. As we sit with the dying and the destitute with everything stripped away, the more beautiful Jesus becomes to me. It makes me realise that I have absolutely nothing to present of myself and absolutely everything to receive of Him.
Every day is a journey deeper into the heart of God.
Our agendas are taken away, our providence is dependent in the miraculous, and ministry is not something we do but a life we live together in Him. Finding gardens in unexpected places and in the least of these because of the One beholding gardens in me.
We're farther away than we've ever been, but united all the more with Jesus in His joy and suffering. Living daily in the beauty of this hope- "we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our mortal flesh." From the ends of the earth to the end of myself, the story is being brought together in a mosaic of redemption. From everywhere we've been to everywhere else we may be taken, we pray to live beholding the resurrection in every surrounding and every soul.
