As most of you know, I am in my last summer as a college student and about to begin my senior year at Covenant! It is so amazing to me all that God has done in my heart the last three years. Really, I am so excited about whatever He has for me after I graduate. I am not nervous or afraid, but very expectant.
This summer has surprised me in a lot of ways... I didn't know what it would be about or what I would learn or what I would do for a lot of it. I had so many ideas and plans for it, and mostly all of them fell through. So my only plans that I made were: 1) Go to Ohio and work for my dad for the first bit. 2) Go to Florida to visit a dear friend I hadn't seen in years. 3) Go to Honduras for five weeks to be with my sister Sharon, my brother-in-law Marvin, and my six-month-old chubby and happy niece Michayla. Other than some weddings, those are the only plans I made. Now that I look at it, maybe it is a lot of plans! I have some other ones for the rest of the summer still pending... We will see what happens.
At this point, I am in stage 3 of summer, in my third week of being in Honduras. What has surprised me most is the theme of this summer, which I didn't anticipate, and the theme has been: healing. Really, there are many themes. There has also been serving, trust, evangelism... But healing has run through all of these and my heart is filled with hope for the freedom that Jesus is allowing me to walk in through healing my heart. When I talk about healing, I don't just mean healing from specific physical or emotional wounds. I do mean that too, but I also mean healing from my fallen way of being.
We rarely understand how far we've fallen from what we were made to be... Part of the way that Jesus' pierces our hearts when we read about His life is by the stark contrast between our way of being and His. Since Adam and Eve, He was the most human person who ever walked this earth. I don't like the phrase, "I'm only human!" in the way that most people mean it, because they want to say, "I'm not perfect and I make mistakes," but that isn't what being human was supposed to be. Jesus reminds us of who we were truly made to be: living completely free from worry because we are trusting and depending on our God, loving extravagantly and patiently, bold and so humble, and only ever about God's glory and never about our own reputation or success...
It is so piercing... I can't be that way when my heart is twisted like this. That is where the healing comes in: softening my heart where it is hard, enlarging it where it is small, stoking the fire where it is cold, bringing it to life where it is dead. I am finding it very painful in the best kind of way. I've done a lot of crying this summer, and I am so grateful for that. Even that is a testimony of healing, because I haven't had many tears in my life over the years since learning too early in life how to say a tearless goodbye. This really is the first year that I've been able to cry about things in life regularly again. (I don't know how you reading this feel about tears, but I think they are wonderful! You can't truly rejoice until you've truly mourned.)
I'm running out of time to write this particular blog post. I'd love to hear thoughts about anything I've written or tell more about specific ways God is healing me. I want to share a quote that has stuck on my mind from a book that I finished yesterday, Tortured for Christ, by Richard Wurmbrand:
"We should never stop at having won a soul for Christ. By this, we have done only half the work. Every soul won for Christ must be made to be a Soul-Winner."
What if every Christian was a Soul-Winner? (Or in other words, a Fisher of Men?)
