I remember missionaries coming to my church when I was a little girl. They always mesmerized me, but not in a good way. Their kids would wind up in my Sunday school class and they all wore hand made clothes that were really worn out. They brought slide shows of poor people living in the dirt. I thought being a missionary was the absolute worst thing that anyone could ever do. I remember being upset about this around age 10 and asking my mom about it. She confirmed that God doesn’t call everyone to be missionaries and if He wanted me to go, He would most likely put the desire in my heart. I was relieved that He had not put that desire in me because there was no way I would ever want to do that and live among those pitiful poor people. This scenario is so vividly clear in my memory. I remember the real honest fear I felt of what I would do if God called me. I was so relieved to hear that I didn’t have to feel fear or guilt, because that was not my calling. Little did I know, but God would change my heart…
I visited Africa in 1999 and spent a month visiting medical missionary, Rachel Berg, who was my childhood Sunday school teacher. This trip profoundly opened my eyes and I immediately saw all the rewards of going to the mission field. Their simplistic lifestyle and desperate hunger for God left a lasting impact on me. I felt great compassion for them and was just so blessed for having the opportunity to go.
Since then, I have always felt that I needed to go back and that God was calling me to serve again in Africa. I fought this calling and blatantly ignored it for long time. I wanted to do things my way. I found most churches to be spiritually “dead” and not at all meeting my needs. I wanted nothing of the tainted “religion” I saw in most churches and in others. So I completely ignored this calling and took my life into my own hands and did things my way. I was determined to have the picture perfect life without having to get up on Sundays to socialize over coffee and donuts in Sunday school. So I led my life the way I wanted to for a long time. It was good and fun at times, but ultimately I found myself beating my head against a brick wall, getting nowhere and becoming bruised and beaten from the self mutilation. I began to ask God to show me Himself. I wanted a God who was real and could change things in my life in a radical way. Things began to change. Specifically, I just slowly started hearing Him in my heart. I started to spend evenings at home reading the Bible, Max Lucado, and anything I could get my hands on. I started to enjoy going home to the peace and solitude of just “soaking” with Jesus.
Then I started having dreams. Yes, dreams. Very symbolic, very real dreams. I have had them from time to time in life and am learning more and more how to interpret and know a dream from God. One specific dream occurred several years ago. I was in a large farm house on top of a mountain with a great big tree in the yard with a tire swing. The house had large screened in sleeping porches all around with twin beds against the walls all the way around. Two little girls were running in and out of the porches and they wore their hair in braids. Mom and Dad were there in my dream and I knew we were all in Africa. I assumed the girls were my nieces and Carla (my sister) and her husband were there too. Just a few months ago God spoke to me during prayer with Him and He told me the girls were not Catherine and Gracie, but my own little girls. I can truly foresee this coming to pass. A day when my whole family is with me, living in the dirt in Africa. The dreams continued and I began to study more about dreams and began to see God in an entirely different light. I had known Him as a distant God and had been repulsed by the hypocrisy of the church. When I began to seek Him on my own I suddenly began to see that He is very real, very powerful and very much involved in our lives. He is the same “yesterday, today and forever”. I just started asking for things and started getting answers! Specifically I had to have a change of heart in a given matter. No money in the world, or therapy, can totally change your heart. This has to be a miracle. So as I began to pray, seek and ask, I began to honestly feel a healing of my heart and a complete change in that area.
In my reading and studying I kept hearing the names Heidi and Rolland Baker. I heard of them first in a sermon, then in a book, and then I saw a video of theirs on the back table of a church. I bought the video and as I watched Heidi speaking, as I was making Thanksgiving dinner, I instantly felt her heart. She is just a simple blonde-haired petite woman that God called to go to Mozambique. She made the comment, “I’d rather live in the dirt than in Laguna Beach”. That was it! That was what I had been struggling with for a long time. I had wanted something more out of life. Is it my ultimate goal to live in Sea Island, play at the Beach Club and dress my kids in matching seer sucker or do I want more? I wanted more and “the dirt” was exactly where I wanted to go. I had been praying for things to change. I wanted more out of the life I was leading and I desperately needed direction. My heart leaped when I heard her say that because I knew exactly what she meant by living in the dirt and I knew “Laguna Beach” had nothing to offer me. As my quote from Rolland Baker says, “I want to humble myself before God and go lower still along the low road- the only way forward, until I am as desperate for God as the poor in Africa”. I want to show them the God that I know and pour out His love on them.
Suddenly things began to fall into place, the mission school and all of that. His provisions continue to show me that I am doing the right thing. I am still very human and a total idiot at times. I don’t know what will happen after this at all. I am far from perfect, but if we wait until we become the ultimate person of integrity and character before we go, we will never get anywhere. So I am just putting myself out there. I want to go and I want to be forever changed. Meanwhile, I just walk in His sufficient grace every single day.
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