Your mind and your feelings can lie to you. For example last week there was a moment when I felt like ants were crawling all over me, but when I looked done there was nothing. That time my body was playing tricks on me. However yesterday I was sitting on a park bench minding my own business thinking everything was just fine. But when I happened to look down, a whole army of ants were swarming all over my foot and leg. Sometimes you think you are fine, but you are not.
Before coming down here there were things I thought I’d overcome, battles I thought were won, issues that were laid to rest, and things that I didn’t think were a big deal. However, being here in another country, in an intense academic program, in an environment where we battle sensory overload almost 24/7, and experience physical & mental exhaustion, struggles rear their ugly heads that you don’t expect. You’d think being an “Almost Overseas Worker” at a Christian school for overseas workers, surrounded by other believers, that being spiritually strong would be a given and there would be few spiritual fights to face.
I’d been told before choosing to follow Jesus overseas, that the battles would be worse and technically I believed what I was told, but hearing and experiencing are two different things. Perhaps I thought coming down here I’d have lots of time to spend with God and grow spiritually by leaps and bounds easily. But we are in a WAR, and nothing comes easily.
The past two weeks were probably the hardest academically but that was not the problem. The real problem was I was becoming spiritually weak. I hadn’t been spending quality time with God each day, I hadn’t been focusing on Him or on loving Him. And it was showing: impatience, negativity, selfish, & other old temptations creeping back to the front and even being given in to. Worse still I didn’t even notice that much. It is easy to blame being tired, or busy, or a thousand other excuses.
However, God is FAITHFUL. He loves “His girl,” even when she doesn’t seem to care. So He got my attention early this past week, partially because others needed pray for some big things and needed people who were prayer warriors (you can’t be a prayer warrior if you don’t have your spiritual armor on). That was the first wake up call. The second attention grabber was the realization that the things I mentioned earlier (selfishness, thought battles) were growing and I wasn’t getting victory.
PRAISE God for these wake-up calls and for three individuals who, without knowing it, shared much needed truth. One chapel speaker shared “If it weren’t for sin the Bible would not have needed to be written. The Bible is God being a missionary to us to tell us the Good News of the gospel.”
A pastor shared “The Bible is not to be just read, it must be explored if we are ever going to grow in the Lord.”
Finally, one of the missionary ladies and I went out to lunch and she shared, “Don’t focus on programs, agendas, busyness. They don’t matter. What matters is being God’s child and focusing on knowing Him more & developing to be more like Christ.”
Grateful for God’s GRACE, forgiveness, and cleansing. He is helping me intentionally carve out more time each day to be studying His Word and to talk to Him more. I can’t say everything is now perfect, but I can say He is helping change my focus, helping me chose victory, helping me want to desire Him. And I’ve learned that feeling fine can be deceptive, but no matter how big a real problem is, HE is Greater.
“Indeed we have the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves but in God who raises from the dead.” (II Corinthians 1:9)
“Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.” (II Corinthians 7:1)
And then can you PRAISE God with me for what He did this week, even as He was in the middle of getting me back on track? He gave me boldness to try to talk in Spanish (insert “two-/three- word sentences” here), individually with two of the neighborhood guards (our neighborhood and the community I walk through to get to school). In each case, at the end God led me to give them a gospel tract in Spanish. Please join me in praying for these two older gentlemen (Herman & Rodrigo).
Apparently around here, day time guard duty is given to older people who enjoy socializing with passers-by and periodically walking around blowing their whistles. The night time guards are phantoms who enjoy the thrill of shattering the stillness of the night with a shrill whistle on-the-hour-every-hour. (Oh, wait a minute, I’m being negative aren’t I? Oops.)
Yesterday was also a special. My Tico family took me on a whirl-wind tour of three towns here in Costa Rica (Grecia, Sarchi, and Zarcero), each of which had beautiful parks. What fun to photograph these lovely places and build some memories with these kind people.