How do I begin to sum up a year spent in one of the most
exhausting, heart-wrenching, beautiful, and transformational communities I’ll
likely ever be a part of? It’s hard to
know where to start after I stopped writing about my journey at His Mansion 6
months ago. My reasons for taking a
break were 2-fold:
- My experience here had grown so painful and personal that I could not face writing about them in blog form.
- I had come to realize that in order to serve here well I needed to let go of everything that lay behind for the time being in order to truly invest in the present and jump into the rest of my time whole-heartedly.
In some ways I feel like it’s a
bummer that I quit blogging/journaling tho, because the last 6 months have been
some of the richest and most meaningful community experience(s) I’ve been a
part of. There’s no way I can explain
the innumerable ways the Lord showed up in my life as well as the lives of
those I serve and lead alongside, in both huge and minuscule ways.
It was in the ways I witnessed God provide grace through the
judicial system to allow one of the most eager residents here to remain instead
of having to serve his time in prison. Or
how the passion and eagerness of a young college student who came here on
Summer Staff reignited my own as well as speaking God’s love into my hurt and
pain as I tried to speak into his. It was in how choosing to continue to walk
with, love, and reconcile with those here I had felt hurt by led to a couple of
the closet relationships I had on the mentor team. Or in His amazing faithfulness I saw just
this week through this story: I was talking with a young lady here about to
graduate on Saturday about how she had no idea where to go when she graduated.
She had been praying for the last month and reaching out but nothing had opened
up yet and God kept telling her just to rest and trust Him. We prayed briefly (just last Monday) and I
left thinking I will probably never know or hear about how God is faithful to
her. Then right before my Cake Day on
Wednesday morning (HM refers to a staff member’s last day on the hill as their
cake day when everyone gathers to eat cake and celebrate their commitment here)
that same woman made an announcement about how while out to eat at a restaurant
with her fellow soon-to-be grads an older woman approached her and they started
talking. My friend had barely started to
share her story with this older women before the lady stopped her and said she
had an open room in her home and had been praying for the last week that the
Lord would direct her to share it with someone in need.!
His faithfulness is evident in the way that I was able to
leave my time as a mentor knowing the residents are in the very capable and
united hands of 9 mentors passionate about the role they serve in (6 of whom I
had stood alongside as they walked the graduation stage prior to returning as
mentors). We refer to that dorm as a brotherhood for a very good reason; those
men are family to me. God was faithful
in how I got to spend a year of my life walking with and watching some of the
most dysfunctional and hurting men become some of the most passionate and
committed disciple’s of Jesus I’ve ever known.
It was in the ways that those same mens’ stories and journeys
simultaneously wrecked and refined my own--I'm proud to have been part of such a
rag-tag ragamuffin discipleship team.
The best way I can sum up my year as a whole and a few of the things I’m
carrying back home with me is through sharing the speech I wrote to my His
Mansion family on my cake day:
Cake Day Speech Wednesday,
Sept 10th
“Trust in the Lord with all you Heart and lean not on your
own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths
straight.” –Proverbs 3:5-6
Sixteen months ago I sat down and created this blog. I titled it Make My Paths Straight as a bold
statement of the faith and trust I was proclaiming upon the Lord as I made some
very unconventional decisions about where to head with my life for the next
year and four months. I was about to
graduate with a degree in Civil Engineering and was eager to follow a call to
missions I had heard years ago as I prepared for a summer-long internship in a
desperately impoverished village area in Swaziland, Africa. Just days before, however, I had gotten off
the phone with Michael Tso after committing to serve as a mentor on some
foreign hilltop to me known as His Mansion.
I remember taking a huge breath knowing I had finally made a decision that
I had sat on for months. It meant I was
turning down the Vision and Call internship at Twin Rocks Friends Camp. It meant at the very least putting on hold
for a year everything else I felt the Lord wanted me to pursue. And yet for some reason I knew He had called
me here. And so I was stepping out; away
from my family, away from a career for the time being, and away from all of my
friends pursuing their college dreams. Trust in the Lord was the only common
ground or solid rock upon which I had to stand.
My college years had transformed
who I was as a person from a reserved, awkward, and homeschooled Christian kid
trying desperately to fit in into a confident, accomplished, and impassioned
leader around my college campus. I felt
that Jesus’ blessings were everywhere upon my life and I was eager to praise Him
for it. It’s easy to have the faith of a
child when everything seems to be going your way. With that in mind I found myself journaling
these words in Africa about whether my faith would stand amidst intense
testing:
“Being
disciples means intentionally worshiping and seeking the Lord through all that
we do and everything that might be thrown our way. Will I praise the Lord when life is well, I
am achieving much, and am experiencing rich blessings? Will I praise the Lord when my spirit is
crushed, my motivation gone, and my body in pain?”
Welcome to life at His Mansion. It is definitely fair to say that I arrived
here with open hands towards this community yet holding tightly onto everything
else I did not want to let go of. But
if God has taught me anything during my time here its that He want us to hold
onto Him tightly and Him alone. Most of my first 6 months here were spent
bitterly resisting letting go as I faced the death of my grandmother, a
relationship breakup, and what appeared to be no end to grief and brokenness as
people left this community. In my times
of prayer I found myself faced more and more with the honest complaint…“Lord, I
really regret trusting you.” In
fact, I spent nearly the entire month of March praying and earnestly asking the
Lord to provide a clear and obvious way to leave this ministry and step into an
easier faithfulness elsewhere. But God
would not let me go and instead I began to experience freedom and peace that
can only be found in trusting God as we let go of everything else we so
desperately want to hold on to. In
letting go I was finally able to honestly start facing some of my own idols and
pains I didn’t want the Lord to touch. He
began to open my eyes to how early childhood trauma and growing up feeling
“alone” in a large family had caused my own struggles with anxiety and loneliness
I didn’t want to admit. God used my
journey at His Mansion to break through my own pride and desire for control to
show me how those wounds were causing me to worship comfort & security in
place of Him. Gradually Jesus
started to show me that maybe what I thought of as dysfunction He actually saw
as formational; what I saw as loss He saw as potential to be made new. While I thought of healing as a destination,
perhaps he sees it as the journey.
Trusting Him, Ive been coming to learn, means a lot more than professing
a confident faith; often it means wrestling with Him moment by moment. Can I trust in God’s faithfulness that is not
only outside of my day-to-day experiences but outside of my very lifetime as
well? It’s a question I need to keep
asking myself, even as God leads me full circle back to home and back to camp.
My favorite description of trust so far I found a few months
back in a book called Quiet
Talks on Prayer by
S.D. Gordon. In it he proclaims that
this is what it means to trust and wait on the Lord:
"Steadfastness, that is holding on;
Patience, that is holding back;
Expectancy, that is holding the face up
Obedience, that is holding one's self in readiness to go or do; Listening, that is holding quiet and still so as to hear."
Obedience, that is holding one's self in readiness to go or do; Listening, that is holding quiet and still so as to hear."
The best encouragement I can offer to all of you is to keep
trusting Him.; Press on with a trust that is willing to be steadfast and
patient, expectant and obedient, and takes the time to slow down and listen
moment by moment, and day by day. Keep
your eyes upon Jesus, let go of what lies behind, and He will make your paths
straight.
