So for those of you that don't know, I am currently on a missions trip in Turvo, Brazil. I am in an orphanage taking care of the kids that live here and shining the light of Christ in their lives. I have not had much time to kind of put my thoughts together (since I only got here yesterday) and this is going to be kind of a sucky blog entry but here's what I have learned so far.
Up first: Fear.
So this is a new thing for me. I've never been one to be afraid of things, but recently fear has been wanting to work its way into my heart. I've been learning about the different types of fear there are, but I think that this one hit home the most because of the way God showed it to me.
Going from the U.S to Brazil was a bit tougher than what I expected. I knew I had a close to 10 hour flight I had to take but I didn't think much of it. I'm not afraid of plane rides or anything like that, but I just discovered that they are one of my least favorite things in the world. On my way from Chicago to Brazil I had to take a plane from Orlando to Sao Paulo, everything was going great...until we took off.
A little after we took off we came accross some turbulence, it was bad. Here I am in this giant machine, thousands of feet in the sky and with no protection, if something fails, then we all die. So the plane started to shake a bit and so did my heart. That's when the fear came. This fear was different because I was not afraid. I knew that God was in control, I knew He had it down, but the thought of falling thousands of feet to my death remained in my head. Once fear takes you captive, it doesn't let go. Let fear invade you once and it will have you for life unless you do something about it. So you can have fear, but you don't particularly have to be afraid. Being afraid is recognizing that fear has some kind of power over you, it is you giving it the authority to violate your volition. So I allowed the fear to remain, but I refused to accept the thought that maybe I could fall to my death because God was not in control of the airplane or the weather.
God's word for me over the days before my trip were do not be afraid, and although I do not think this is my last encounter with fear, I do believe that this is one of the reasons why God said those words to me.
And now: being still
Psalm 46:10 says Be still and know that I am God
Well I got a glimpse of this on my way here. So although I did come here on my own, I did not travel by
myself. I did not come with a group or anything, but I was blessed enough to travel with Jake and Amanda, my bosses and directors of the orphanage that I'm staying in. Now at some point, they kind of took over and led me to where I needed to go and stuff. So at the airport in Sao Paulo and in Curitiba I was kind of just following them.
At some point we had to catch a bus from Curitiba to Turvo. Here's when the lesson came.
I have no idea how things work for buses here. I don't know about the times or the places where to catch them, nothing. But Jake does, he has been doing this for many years. Now we were at the point of the trip where I was clueless about what was coming next. So we catch the bus and we take this bus up to Turvo. The bus literally left us on the side of the road. So if you can imagine, there was a gas station near by (we were a few feet away) and we had our 8 pieces of luggage, and it was getting dark. This is the part in a horror movie where people start dying. lol
And it was also the part where I had to trust Jake and what he was doing. Jake was figuring out our transportation from there to the orphanage because the phones had decided to stop working. Although it was dark, although it was starting to rain, although we had a crazy amount of luggage, I was not worried. I was not worried at all, not even for a second. I was trusting Jake, I knew he knew what he was doing and he would take care of it. This is when I remembered this verse.
Often times we see this verse as a burden, because being still is SOOOO HARD!! But this time I took it as a privilege. It felt so good to not have to worry about how we were gonna get from one point to another, it felt so good to know that I was not in charge. I think we see this verse as such a burden because we forget to look at the bigger picture. We concentrate on how hard it is for us to be still and not on how natural it is for God to be in control. There hasn't been a moment in history that God has not been in control.
Being still requires a stillness of mind that we rarely achieve because of the society that we live in. A woman from my church said to me a couple of days ago "It's hard to be still and know when you are never still".
This is where we get to the second part of the verse, being still requires you to have absolute confidence in the fact that God is who He says He is. I was able to be still because I knew with all my heart that Jake was going to figure something out. I just knew it. My mind dind't wonder off, my heart dind't start racing at any point, I always knew that Jake would do whatever he had to do to get us to the orphanage. That's how it has to be when we trust God. Being still means your mind stays rooted in who you know that God is, no matter how dark or rainy our lives may be. But in order for that to happen, you have to have the right idea of God. You have to know that God is faithful, God is righteous, God is love, God is perfect, God is all-knowing, God is all powerful, etc etc.
Being still is a privilege that we take for granted. It's not about how things are for you, it's about how easy they are for God.
These are the two big lessons I've gotten so far. I am beyond excited to see where God takes me and what other things He's going to show me next.
