Learning from Experience

I don’t like learning from experience. I like having experience. I like knowing what to do based on experience. I just don’t like the process of learning from experience. I think experience is the best way to learn something, but if I could learn everything I need to know by reading a book and studying, I would.

Learning from experience is humbling and it’s usually hard. That’s why I don’t like it. In order to learn something through experience, you typically have to be experiencing something you’ve never done before or at least not done much. That means that you don’t know what you’re doing. And it usually means you will fail. And many times when you don’t know what you’re doing, people are watching. They are watching you, and they know you don’t know what you’re doing and they think you’re an idiot. At least that’s how it feels to me.

I don’t like to make mistakes. I really don’t like for other people to see me make mistakes. And why is that?

Pride.

Pride is my biggest struggle. It’s the sin I see most often in my life. And by most often, I mean everyday. Multiple times a day.

I want to be perfect…in everything I do…all the time. And I want everyone around me to know that I’m perfect. But you know what? I’m not. I’m far from perfect. I know that, but I still want people to think I’m perfect. How arrogant is that?

I think that if people see me as perfect, they will like me and respect me. Well, first of all, everyone won’t always like and respect me. And even if my perfection would guarantee my popularity and respect, that’s not God’s plan. God’s plan is to bring glory to Himself, and if people hating me, disrespecting me, and looking down on me brings glory to God, then that’s what needs to happen.

My humility, not my arrogance will allow people around me to see Christ. My dependence on Christ, not my pride in my abilities will turn people to Him.

God has placed me in situations lately that allow me to either choose humility or get smacked in the face with it. I’m batting about .500 in choosing humility, and that’s being generous. Many of the situations He’s placed me in are painful and difficult, regardless of if I choose humility or get smacked with it. So why would God place me in these situations?

I’ve been questioning Him about this for several weeks now. Last week at community group, a friend said something that really hit me. We were talking about qualities (in us or other people) that attract people to Christ. She said that the people who have shined the brightest for Christ in her eyes weren’t those who had it all together and seemed perfect. It was the people who seemed to struggle well with life who shined the brightest.

That hit me hard because currently I am not struggling well with life. I’m certainly struggling with life, but I’m not struggling well. That thought has stuck with me as I attempt to press on each day. In every situation, everyday, God wants me to struggle well with life that I might “shine as lights in the world” (Phil. 2.15).

Then, Oswald Chambers hammered the point home when he said, “God places His saints where they will bring the most glory to Him and we are totally incapable of judging where that may be.”

Ouch, that hurt my pride…oh wait, that was the point.

Another Free Audio Book

Ok, so Forgotten God was really good. I haven't listened to my August download yet, but I can tell you you definitely want to get this month's free audiobook from Christian Audio. Go here and download Spiritual Leadership by J. Oswald Sanders. I'm almost done with the paperback and have filled up several pages of quotes. Be sure to listen with a pen and paper. Great book.

Thrifty

So buying a cabinet at Goodwill for $15 and then sanding it and painting it black so it looks good in the kitchen isn't specifically mentioned in Proverbs 31, but it's implied, right?

Either way, I like my little coffee station. :)

Live Your Snapshot

Last month, I had the privilege of going to the island Eleuthera, in the Bahamas to serve alongside about 35 high schoolers and adults from Grace Church. The trip was amazing. We got to spend time with a family from our church, The Fastzkies, who are living and serving in Eleuthera. We got contribute to a couple construction projects, putting roofs on a water cistern and medical clinic. We also got to put on a Bible School for the kids on the island.

As I said, the trip was amazing because of the people and the opportunities God opened up for us there, but it was special to me for another reason. This was my first trip out of the country since coming back from China.

While I was in China, we had several short term teams come to serve with us, so I was used to being the “longer term” person organizing the teams, preparing, and following up. The trip to the Bahamas was the first time I had been on the “other side” in several years, and the perspective God granted me in China really changed the way I viewed the trip.

I think on short term trips, it’s easy to view yourself and your time there as unimportant, because you’re not there long enough to make a difference. I know many times, this has been my attitude. But the thing is, and this is what I learned in China, God places you in specific places at specific times with specific people to do a specific task. It is our obedience in these specific things that bring glory to His name. It’s so difficult for us to really believe this, though, because we can’t see the whole picture. We can only see our miniscule snapshot. God knows the whole movie, though, and places us in our snapshot for a reason.

One night in small group, I felt like God wanted me to share what short-term teams look like from the “other side” and how much God can (and does) use short-term teams to make a big impact. So I shared the following story…

After being in China for about 5 months, a teammate and I made a trip to a friend’s home village. This friend was a new believer and already growing astonishingly in the Lord. This village was one we hadn’t planned on visiting at all because foreigners were not received well at all and had even recently been kicked out. We certainly were not well received there during this visit. While in the village, though, we visited the elementary school, where we discovered they had no clean water to drink. They drank out of filthy cistern, using a communal hose that stayed on the ground next to the cistern.

We agreed this was not ok, and if there was any way to fix this, we would. We immediately began brainstorming ideas and trying to find people to ask for help, since neither my teammate nor I were water purification/piping experts. As I talked to my dad about this, he decided he wanted to help. He contacted a friend who was involved in water purification in Africa, and the 3 of us began discussing how their bio-sand filters might work for us.

Five months later, my dad and stepmom were on a plane to China. We assembled all sorts of parts for our cistern/filter prototype, and headed to the village. During this trip, we were received fairly well in the village, and our language was coming along, which allowed us to communicate more. After completing the plastic prototype with my dad, we began discussing a permanent solution.

The next teammate that joined our team just happened to be the agriculture guy we needed. He came just weeks before a small team (4 construction workers) from SC came out to work with us. We quickly put them to work building a cistern with a bio-sand filter at a spring toward the top of the mountain. While they were working, my other teammate and I got to go in every class in the elementary school, give out toothbrushes and worm medicine, and tell them about the Great Physician.

Over the next year, we had several teams come to work on 2 other cisterns and pipe water from the first cistern to the school. Each team stayed for less than 2 weeks, but their contribution lasted much longer.

The more time we spent in the village, the more we were welcomed back. As we showed Christ’s love by meeting physical needs, the more their hard hearts opened to hearing about our true need. In the year and a half I spent making trips to this village, I saw 2 people accept Christ, and many more become open to dialoguing about Him. We also saw our friend, who first took us there, be empowered by the Holy Spirit with a boldness to share Christ that I’ve rarely seen in mature followers. And one of the people who chose to follow Christ was a young boy; the first male believer that we know of in that village.

I bet, though, that if you asked any of those short term teams about the impact they made there, they would talk about the cistern or pipe, and wouldn’t be so sure about the eternal impact. In the same way, if you ask us what impact we had in Eleuthera, we’d probably talk about the shingles on the roof or playing games with kids, not so sure about the kingdom impact.

That’s because we can only see the snapshot, not the whole movie. And the thing is the story I just shared with you is only a very few snapshots, maybe a frame of the movie. God was working in that village before we got there and continues to work once we’re gone, just as He was in Eleuthera before we got there and will be there once we leave. He doesn’t need to use us, but He chooses to. He gives us opportunities everyday to glorify Him through obedience wherever He happens to place us. But He always gives us the choice.

Listen to Him. Obey Him. Live out your snapshot for Him, and be confident that He works before, after, and in the midst of our snapshot. Because the movie isn’t about us. It’s about Him. He just loves us enough to include us in a snapshot.

*Picture from http://fashion.elle.com/blog/

Take Care Lest You Forget

This morning at Grace, Matt Williams preached on the conversation between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7. In speaking about how she was desperate for Jesus because she knew she was empty on her own, he asked, “When everything is going our way, are we still desperate for Jesus, or are we full on our own?”

He then said, “Wherever our strengths lie, we must release that so that it doesn’t become and idol.”

It reminded me of the passage in Deuteronomy 8, where Moses is imploring the Israelites to remember God and all He has provided.

"Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. Beware lest you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.' You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day. And if you forget the LORD your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. Like the nations that the LORD makes to perish before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the LORD your God.” – Deuteronomy 8.11-20

So how do we take care to not forget? Moses gives us that answer, as well:

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. – Deuteronomy 6.5-7

And Paul also reminds us that nothing good comes from us:

“For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh…Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!...For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. – Romans 7.18,24-25, 8.3-4

All things in my call for my rejection, All things in You plead my acceptance

Praise be to God!

- Picture from provindents.com

It's August? For Real?

Where did summer go? (I realize that I live in SC and summer still has about 2 months left, but with school and football starting , it feels like fall is right around the corner.) This summer has been so crazy, but wonderful at the same time. I've been super busy and tired for most of the summer, but it's been worth it. I can't honestly say I've loved every minute of it, but overall it's been a great summer filled with old and new friends. And maybe one of the best parts is that Greenville feels so much like home to me now, every time I left town, I was excited to come back to my church, my friends, and my house.

So what have I been up to? Let's see...

- National Athletic training conference in Philly - where I got to spend time with my dear cousin, Whitney, and also see her brother Johnny and his family.

- Bachelorette weekend for Elizabeth at Douglas lake outside of Knoxville, TN.

- Peikou's wedding in Louisville, KY, where I also got to see some great friends and go to the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory.

- My cousins, Jennifer and Polo, and their daughter, Gracie, came to visit and we went to the Atlanta Aquarium.

- Bahamas mission trip with the emosewa Wafuasi and Dioko peeps from Grace Church. (Had to steal one of Sabrina's pictures for this because on this trip my camera started to get moody...then it broke.)

- Elizabeth and Rusty's wedding in Knoxville, TN. (My camera was pretty useless for the majority of this trip, as well, but I did get a couple good pictures.)

- Started a new job.

- Rob and Renae's engagement party in Columbia (where I took no pictures).

Yeah, so that's what's been going on. I'm going to try to catch up on some blogs I've been wanting to write throughout the summer (we'll see how that goes). God has been teaching me things and showing me things from new perspectives in my life lately, and I'd really like to share some of those thoughts. Hopefully I'll make the time to do that soon.

SCL: Spotting a Missionary

This SCL post is awesome...and so true.

It reminds me of the book my sister says she's going to write about missionaries coming back to America. She's going to call it "No Ice, Please." Brilliant.

This part is hilarious:

I know when I meet someone and they start talking about their trip to China and all the cultures, towns, language, and people they met. Well, if the story is longer than a few seconds my eyes glaze over as all I can think of is, “But did you get to walk on The Great Wall?”

It's so true. I've been talking about people groups and entire mountain villages who have never heard the name of Jesus and had people ask, "Did you go to the Olympics in Beijing?" or "How far were you from the Great Wall?"