We’ve not even been in Brazil for 3 weeks, and already God has done some amazing stuff. Not one of us here is the same person we were when we left home. God is shaping us more into His image everyday, and it is so exciting to be part of His work. What is even more exciting is that this has all happened in a place that I had initially thought would be close to impossible for that to happen. All we have been doing for ministry is manual labor, so we haven’t even been exposed to the poverty and hardship that much yet. So it has been awesome to learn more that God truly is Almighty, and that He can do what He wants, where He wants, how He wants, and when He wants. If He has us doing manual labor for two and a half months, then it is because that is where He wants us to serve and grow in Him.
I feel like He has finally broken me of the idea that I need to be in a slum or orphanage to serve Him, because even though I feel like that is what He has given me the heart for, He can be served anywhere. Clearly He wants us to “have the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus” so that means making ourselves nothing and serving wherever we are. Fortunately for me, it seems that He wants us to be serving in some different ways now! Our leaders just informed us that we have tons of ministry lined up for pretty much the whole rest of our trip! Drug rehab, orphan ministry, prison ministry, and slum ministry, Lord willing. It sounds like our main focus will be the orphan ministry, because we will be spending about 2 weeks there! Woot woot!
I am just so thankful and excited that God is giving us this opportunity to serve Him in new and challenging ways. But there is one thing that I have to be careful of in all this excitement: expectations. The first week or so that we were here was a huge challenge for me because it wasn’t at all like I had expected. But I don’t think the answer is just to not have any expectations, but rather to have an entirely different focus for them. Instead of expecting all sorts of things about where we will be or what we will be doing, I just want to expect to serve God in whatever we do and know that He will use it as He wills. He has already done so much in our time here, and I know that as we continue to submit to His Holy Spirit, He will do some ridiculous stuff.
I am not sure what the next bunch of weeks are going to look like exactly, but I konw that whatever we are doing, I want to serve Jesus to the best of my ability. “Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31)
Jesus, let us go more and more deeply into You and Your love, so that we in return will extend that scandalous love to everyone we meet, especially those who we don’t think deserve it.
