“I will be doing full-time missions work for the next two years.”
I have said this often in the past few months. In the wake of graduation, there have been more than enough “So what are your post-graduation plans?” questions coming at me. For a while, revealing my plans to people actually surprised me. It felt like I was talking about someone else – because certainly this wasn’t what I’d imagined for myself.
For the past 10 or so years, I would often boast that I was going to graduate college, go to law school, and become a lawyer. I had this glorious image of myself as smart, successful, and living out a well-paying, powerful career. Later in my life, I realized that it was this very image of my future that I nurtured in order to distract me from the dark things in my life, from my pain, from feelings of helplessness, unworthiness, and fear. I wanted to keep some sort of control over my own life, so I crafted this picture of future success and used it as a hiding place.
But God is my hiding place. And any time I have ever put something in the place of God, He is really good at shutting it down. A few years ago I was brought to a place where I could no longer ignore the darkness and pain that festered in my life. For a while I was broken, but then I was slowly and beautifully restored.
I was restored by the people in my life who looked at me and said with complete honesty and conviction and love, “You need to pray.”
I was restored by the friends who laughed with me until my sides hurt in the day and then cried with me in the evening.
I was restored by sitting on a bench at the edge of a cliff and watching the sun slowly soak into the night sky.
I was restored by hundreds of images of Christ crucified – the hundreds of which it took for me to realize all He had done for me.
I was restored by climbing out of a sailboat in the ocean off La Gonave island and being baptized there, and feeling free.
I was restored by the realization that all the time I’d believed myself to be alone, I had not been. And all the time I’d believed myself to be fatherless, my Father had been right there.
God has redeemed me and restored me and turned darkness into light before my eyes. I have traveled far and wide wishing everything would change and be different, only to realize the most amazing thing about finding yourself in a new place and a new season of life is that One thing does not change at all. And whatever anxieties and fears I may have about the coming months – God is present with me as I prepare to leave, as I raise support, as I share my testimony, as I move to a new country, and as I encounter darkness and trauma and pain. I believe in the transforming and restorative power of God. And I am SO unbelievably excited to join a team that shares this belief, and seeks to transform broken people into restored people. I know there are such great things to come.