Having been in the field just over four months, one of the biggest lessons God has been teaching me is just how much a wretched sinner I am! I suppose that might sound funny coming from a worker. Often there is this sense that those of us involved in fulltime ministry are somehow super-Christians, incapable of sinning. That's nonsense of course, but still there's this feeling that somehow I should be better at being a Christian, loving people, not getting angry, being patient... But the whole process of moving to a new place and culture acts as a pressure cooker situation where stress is high, emotions are on the edge, and suddenly, sin comes out of the cracks where so far we've been able to keep it hidden but now it's exposed and it's ugly.
I think God loves to use this cross-cultural living~ essentially everything about the m-life~ to act as a refining fire to bring sin to the surface so he can then extract it from us, leaving more pure, Christ-like vessels behind.
One of my areas of brokenness that God has been exposing, is how I always try to look to people for my self-value, my significance. Although I know that my identity is in Christ, it's all too easy to fall back into the patterns of people-pleasing and looking for affirmation from others. Then suddenly, when I don't get that affirmation from others, my self-worth is in doubt.
In a recent training session with my company, we discussed a diagram called the circle of grace (the picture above). This helped me a lot in realizing why so often I feel really vulnerable with sharing myself with others and such. God designed us to put our identity in Him, receive our sustenance and significance from Him, and from there serve others and take joy in the work we do. But when we try to get our identity and self-worth from what we do, or from what others think of us, we're perverting the cycle of grace~ we're starting from achievement and going backwards and thus we just end up frustrated or depressed.
This idea of focusing on my identity in Christ first and foremost has been a such a great revelation for me. There is such freedom in knowing that my self-worth, how much God values me, does not depend on what I do or say, how well I do in my work, whether i perform flawlessly or not, God has made me His child, I am not shaken by what the world thinks of me.
May this ring true for you as well!