It’s time to begin using some vocabulary that makes me feel uncomfortable.  It’s the word “missionary.”  More specifically, when it’s used as an adjective to describe me.  Actually, it’s pretty easy to dismiss the notion because I will be receiving a salary from the school.  I want to be very deliberate here, because the salary is respectable and I am both grateful for it, and I can promise you this would not be happening without it.  My skeptical self would never have considered the idea of moving to Honduras in the first place if there weren’t compensation in it.  That’s part of the reason why I’m having such a hard time with this word.  But the fact remains that it won’t be enough to support a family of four and two round-trip sets of airfare (including coming to the US over Christmas).  And it really shouldn’t.

If it did, I’d have no reason to trust God.  I’d be self-sufficient.  Man, that would be great, but it’s not part of the plan!  I’m still learning that I can’t do it all on my own.  None of us can.  And if I were self-sufficient, I wouldn’t be reaching out to you – which is what is happening now if you hadn’t already noticed.  And I mean this quite seriously, that that would be depriving you of an opportunity to share in that way in this journey, which I truly have been led to believe will make an impact on other people’s journeys.  That is my great hope and prayer.

Now you can “share” in many ways.  Two stand out as critical.  I’m going to list them in order of inverse importance.

The first is financial.  When people use the word “financial,” they mean money.  We need money!  A lot of people have trouble saying that (including me) due to the culture we live in where money talk is bad manners.  This is God teaching me that money is something that people use, not something that they are.  When I value myself based on my financial income, I’m setting myself up for disaster.  Because I don’t care who you are… you are worth so much more than what’s in your checking account.  It sounds cliché, but you’re worth more than all the money in the world.  Seriously, you are, you’re invaluable.  When parents say this to their children, it may be true, but even that sentiment is only a dim reflection of what our heavenly father is trying tell each one of us.

The second is prayer.  This is even more important.  If you had told me I would be writing this a couple years ago, I would have said you’re crazy.  If I had read this a couple years ago, I would have said I’m crazy.  But today, I really believe that prayer is not only powerful, but it is meant to be our highest station in life.  Personally, I’d rather have the financial obligation than the one that says I have to move that mountain by faith alone.  And the best part is that there’s no uncomfortableness when it comes to announcing the need for prayer, like there might be around money.  So please, if you are praying for us, feel free to tell us.  At the very least, prayer is a powerful encourager.  At the very most, prayer is utterly transformative.  At its essence, prayer is relationship with the one being that values our relationship the most.

So brass tacks… We just got approved with a missions organization called Modern Day, and they can receive tax-deductible donations on our behalf.  Links are available HERE, and also in other places around the site.  You can even set up a small recurring donation (which you can cancel anytime), and they can also receive checks, and their mailing address is available on our ABOUT page.  They just approved our application last Thursday, and we’re so grateful to be on board.  They have helped so many who have done similar things before us (spoiler alert… there’s about a bajillion missionaries out there already), but they have the capacity to understand the unique requirements of all the different places in this big world we live in.

We don’t currently have a specific fundraising goal, and we may not even set one.  I will say that we will be needing thousands of dollars, but we don’t want to put our restrictions on God’s plans.  I definitely don’t mean to slight anyone with an established fundraising goal, as whatever they are doing, they are probably doing it better than we are.  I’m not shrugging it off though, either, as we do have a projected budget that I continue to revisit and revise, perhaps occasionally dwelling on it too much.  So the majority of our budget will be living expenses: rent, groceries, toiletries, phones, wifi, some travel, and tithe.  Yes, our Honduran budget has all the same categories as our US one.  It’s really not that different, just a different scale.  Airfare is the next largest area.  We are looking to book our flights there on August 2, and those should get booked within the next few days.  And then there will be some one-time expenses of getting our home set up in Gracias, but I really can only ballpark those, since I don’t know where exactly our home will be or what it will look like!  And we’ll probably buy a car while we’re there, but we plan on using the money from selling Stephanie’s car here before we leave.

So if we raise less than what we need, we’ll find a way to make it work (by trusting God).  If we raise more than what we need, we’d be thrilled to be able to contribute to the organizations we’re going to be working with, or possibly discern that God is implying that our work in Honduras should continue longer.  But primarily, we will be looking to one place only when discerning what our future should be… the throne of God, to which we have direct access through the death and resurrection of his son Jesus Christ.  Did I mention earlier to pray for us?

So even if you don’t think I’m going to be a missionary, that’s fair; I kind of agree with you, but don’t forget about Stephanie.  She’ll be volunteering at the clinic, and taking care of our entire family, myself included.  Oh, and she knows Spanish fairly well, which is the only reason she’s even being accepted as a volunteer.  When I go into town, I plan on following her around and depending on her for everything, much as I do now, only there won’t be grass for her to mow or snow for her to shovel in Honduras.  She’s gonna have so much free time.  But truly, I’ll be leaning on her… In February, when I tried to buy a pop, the clerk said “quince,” so I grabbed a fifty (fifty lempira, about $2) out of my wallet and handed it to her, expecting to be on my way.  She handed me change, and I acted like I knew what was going on and left.  Quince is fifteen (less than 75 cents).  But at least the clerk still thinks I knew that.  Cincuenta is fifty, obviously.  Everybody knows that.

Stephanie may still teach a class at the school, and I’d really love to have that all figured out before I post, but that’s simply not the way real life works.  We are in flux, we are in flow.  We just pray that the Spirit is flowing with us.  One of the greatest joys I have in learning to understand God, and also one of my greatest frustrations thanks to my OCD tendencies, is the notion of God as fluid through time.  He is eternal and unchanging, and so so good outside of time, but once you introduce this time element, he’s a madman!  It kinda seems like he’ll change stuff on you midstream just to mess with you.  Speaking of which, our planned fundraising events are a pancake breakfast at our church on April 15, opening at 7:30AM, and a daffodil sale which will take place around the same time period.  God analyzed my habits and skillset and said, “Yep, I’m gonna make him get up early on a Saturday… and then he’s gonna sell flowers.”  I’d be inclined to be upset if I weren’t so respectful of his playful irony.  Well played, God.  I’m with you.

And thank you for being with us.  So many people have already stepped up to help, it’s really quite overwhelming.  It can be a challenge to accept help from others when our culture has been preaching to you the righteousness of independence your entire life.  Now don’t get me wrong, there are some good lessons there, but it’s not the lesson.  The lesson is to learn to accept help, more specifically to learn to accept grace.  To admit that you can’t do it.  You can’t redeem yourself by your own thoughts or actions, donations or good deeds.  But there is one who can.  One who already has.  One who is waiting for you to accept his help… the kind of help that’s so powerful that it needed it’s own word, grace.  I pray that through our journey and our struggles and frustrations and successes, that you may learn to accept the grace of God ever more in your life.  None of us deserve it, and yet it’s extended to each of us out of the infinite love of our creator.  There’s really nothing we can do in this life to help ourselves, beyond simply accepting the help of the one who loves us.

So thank you.  Thank you for donations, thank you for prayers, thank you for reading this.  And thanks be to God for this journey and the joy that comes along in sharing it with you.

I have to tell you about the only thing I’ve done in my life that’s worth anything.  I have to tell you about it not to brag or to take credit, but because it’s so important and so transformational, that I can’t bear the weight of keeping it to myself.  One day, about a year ago, I gave up on my own plans for my life.

“Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” – Matthew 10:39

Now this was a while before I ever even seriously thought about moving to Honduras, and I’ve spoken to many people both before and after that experience about what it means to give up on our own lives.  How do we actually go about letting God take control of our lives?  What do we have to believe and how do we know we’re doing the right thing at the right time?  If we just believe harder, will it become perfectly clear?

All too often, we’re worried about having God show us the path or the way in our own life.  The reality is that the answer has been hiding in plain sight the entire time.  You’ve heard John 14:6a where Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” but have you really let that sink in?  As you ask God to show you the way in your life, he is going to show you himself.  What specifically you’re going to do next month or next year doesn’t matter.  What does matter is how deeply you’re digging into Christ right now.  He can’t show you anything more than himself, because there is nothing more.  He is the way.

Having a set of beliefs is valuable, but only as valuable as the actions one is willing to take based on those beliefs, and perhaps only as meaningful as the actions one actually takes.  I decided to take action to get out of the way in my own life, and let God do with it what he intended.

Now you’re thinking, “Ok, good for you… specifics please…”

So that day, about a year ago – I don’t remember the date, but it was a Sunday – we went to church like every good Christian should.  (As I write, it’s a Sunday… I didn’t go to church this morning.  Don’t tell anybody.)  I had known for some time that I was supposed to join the prayer team, but I selfishly just didn’t want to.  So this particular Sunday, I simply stopped fighting the urges that God had implanted in me to carry out his will for his glory.  I told God, “Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it.”  He told me, “You already know what I want you to do.”  It was simple… I walked up to my pastor and said, “Hey, I think I’m supposed to be on the prayer team.”  He sent out an email.  I was on the prayer team.

That’s it.  That was the first domino.  God doesn’t call us all to find a billion dollars in venture capital and open an international non-profit.  He doesn’t tell us each to devote our lives to the study of international politics to figure out how to change the global landscape.  He doesn’t have us change the world from the top down.  He always works from the bottom up, calling us only to faithfully put one foot in front of the other.  It’s the little actions we take on a daily, even momentary, basis that all add up to the work God wants to carry out through us.  The little actions themselves are often exceptionally unremarkable.

Jesus was the ultimate subversive.  He doesn’t work the way you would expect him to work.  He didn’t come in power and authority, but he came in squalor and humility.  But then that squalor and humility turns out to be the ultimate power and authority after all!  He doesn’t work the way you think he should… he works so much better than that.

And he rarely gave a straight answer.  Everything is a parable with this guy!  Don’t you think his disciples got sick of him when they would ask a simple question, and he’d roll into some long story about a greater truth?  They’re impatient people just like us, and I guarantee you that happened.  How many times are we impatient with God?  Same thing.  We want him to tell us what to do.  He keeps gently reminding us that he’s already told us a million times.

Now I said this was transformational, but there’s a couple things about transformation.  First, it takes time.  You’re not going to get prestigious assignments at work until you’ve made it clear to your boss that you are capable of handling the more basic assignments you’ve already been given.  Now that isn’t to say that spirituality has the same competitiveness and comparison as a traditional workplace (because it doesn’t), but there are some spiritual cornerstones we must have in place in our lives before God can put the full weight of his will on us without crushing us.  He does so gently and in his time, by responding to our seemingly simple, small, faithful actions.  The construction process of transformation takes time.

Second, transformation is always ongoing.  There are some things I have been able to overcome as a result of giving in to God’s will.  There are many things I have not yet been able to overcome.  This is probably (almost definitely) because I haven’t truly given my entire life over to God yet (yeah, definitely).  There are sins I want to hold on to.  The band Blind Pilot does an incredible Gillian Welch cover in which she writes: “I wanna do right, but not right now.”  I pretend to want all of God, but I want to keep some of the sin for myself.  Thankfully, we have a God who is as patient as he is demanding, and he allows his ongoing transformation to continue to work in me.  Transformation is ongoing.

“Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.  God is holding back to give us that chance.  It will not last forever.  We must take it or leave it.” – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

So simple, small, right action.  This is our calling.  This is how we discover the true character of God.  Sometimes quickly in large doses, but so much more often slowly and deliberately, as God in his infinite wisdom and infinite love spares us from the crushing reality of himself, only ever revealing to us as much as we can handle.

In this way, he satisfies our ultimate desire.  The one for him that he planted deep inside each of us.  Nothing in this world satisfies permanently.  It always takes progressively larger quantities of earthly things to satiate us, right up until the point when too much of an earthly thing destroys us.  The only thing which we can forever continue to experience more of, and be continually and fully satisfied by, is God.  He is infinite and infinitely good.  The amount of himself he has already shown us is enough to fully satisfy, and the amount of himself he has left to show us is enough to continue to satisfy us for eternity.  Remember, he’s infinite.  Did I say that already?  That means that there are a few categories in which you can talk about your knowledge of God:

• There’s the character of God that you actually have knowledge of and know to be true.
• There’s the knowledge of the notion of the infinity of God and his infinite goodness.
• And then there’s the actual inexhaustible infiniteness of God of which you cannot possibly even conceive.

Yeah, I think that should be enough for us.  And it would be far too much if we got it all at once.  God gives us a chance to understand more of himself little by little through small, immediate, faithful actions.  So go and do something small today, something you already know God wants you to do.  It will inevitably become part of a much larger and more wonderful, eternal story.

A couple weeks ago, Stephanie and I returned from a week-long trip with a medical brigade that served at the clinic in Gracias, Honduras, which is the town we’ll be moving to in July.  I’ve been convicted of struggling with pride recently… to be clear, the pride isn’t new, but the conviction is.  God would use this opportunity to humble me, even as I was only just beginning to realize my pride.  For some reason, he didn’t feel the need to hold back as he constantly reminded me of how feeble, fragile, and in-over-my-head I am.  I’m just saying, a gentle reminder probably would have done the trick, but I guess that wasn’t in the cards.  I’m certain that he wanted to make it clear to me that the Joyce family doesn’t have work to do in Gracias.  Rather, God has work to do that he wants us to see, and be a part of, and share.

Here we are watching a surgery… Stephanie, comfortable, and me, terrified.

I guess I didn’t know exactly what to expect going in, but I was completely blown away by the medical operation there.  They took a team of medical experts needed to perform the surgeries for the week.  These were desperately needed surgeries that would have happened years ago if these patients had been born in Michigan.  As we walked up to the clinic the first day, laughing and talking, I noticed a crowd of patients, each waiting to be screened and hoping they would be one of the ones selected for surgery that week.  I quickly lost that sense of joviality as the gravity of the situation sunk in.  Here were people that had driven past other big cities, past other hospitals, enduring long and uncomfortable rides, because either they could not afford the care they needed elsewhere, or the access to appropriate healthcare for their situation simply did not exist at any other time in any other place throughout their country.  We had three doctors with us, an orthopedic surgeon, a gynecological surgeon, and an ophthalmologist.  They each brought only the support staff absolutely necessary to conduct their procedures.  And then there was me.  Humbled and almost ashamed as all the Honduran faces eyed us expectantly.  I tried very hard to hide my fear and give them back my most confident and serious face as if to say, “Why yes, of course I am exceedingly qualified to scrub the blood off the instruments after surgery.  Can’t you tell?”  This just wasn’t something for which I was bringing anything to the table.  This was God doing his work, and I was just along for the ride.

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses…  Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” – Hebrews 4:15a, 16

I clearly don’t have a medical background, and I know there were a few others with us that either didn’t have a medical background, or had one that wasn’t directly related to the work they needed to do at the clinic.  I saw God bless them for stepping out of their comfort zone and into his will.  Even those with extensive medical background and expertise in the area of their work at the clinic were stepping out of their comfort zone, and I saw God bless them, too.  There’s no big hospital bureaucracy, no hoops to jump through, no bosses to appease.  But that also means there’s no safety net, no traditional support system, and no one to refer special cases to.  Just over a dozen people to meet the needs of desperate patients in great need of care.  Patients who can’t afford to pay much money, but rather pay richly with hope, trust, friendship, gratitude, and love.

I was also humbled as I was reminded of how much work I need to do on my Spanish.  The school where I’ll be teaching is English-speaking, but that’s barely true of the community.  If I want to have real connections with real people, I’m going to need to be able to approach them (at least on a basic level) in their language.  This is another area where I’m bringing nothing to the table.  I might know the very basics, but God is pushing me, stretching me, using something that is external to me to do his work.  That said, there’s something almost magical about trying to communicate past a language barrier.  There are situations and affections that arise from your interactions that simply wouldn’t if you spoke the same language.  I found I could almost understand a few jokes in Spanish here and there… I probably understood more jokes in Spanish than the medical ones in English around the dinner table.  And those medical people don’t care if you’re eating, they need to tell you about the grossest case they had, and they need to do it now.  Anyway, on Friday, we got to go zip lining (which was incredible), and three Honduran guys were driving us to the top of the course in the back of a pickup.  The driver stopped to point out an enormous iguana sitting on a rock.  I looked at the Honduran guys and said “almuerzo,” which means “lunch.”  They laughed.  Man, I’m funny.

Another humbling experience happened on Tuesday when I got to go to the school and shadow a few classes.  It was wonderful to get a dose of reality and see what the everyday will look like for me.  As it turns out, Honduran high school students are just that… high school students.  They’re absolutely wonderful, but it made me realize that I’ll be responsible for their education, and reminded me that I don’t have the professional background to be able to walk into a classroom on day one and command respect.  I mean, those of you who know me well are aware of the natural way I exude authority, but even that might not be enough.

Here’s a shot of the school, showing just a couple of the many classrooms.  About 400 students attend there, from Pre-K to 12th grade.

Oh, and I barfed again.  At 1AM on the morning we needed to get up at 4AM for the trip back, I woke up and got sick.  I’m not sure if it was dehydration or just something I ate or what, but it reminded me that even my basic physical being can’t handle this by itself.  After a quick prayer for healing, I got in a few more hours of sleep and actually felt pretty good for the trip back.  God was continuing to teach me to rely on him.  It’s not only that I’m bringing nothing to the table, it’s that I even need to be carried to the table in the first place.

So what do we do when we’re utterly unprepared for the road ahead?  While we can and should rely fully on God, he also gave us each other.  We are meant to help one another in this life, and I have had so many friends, many of which are teachers, offer their help, whether it be advice, prayer, practical tips, or tutoring in Spanish.  So far, no one has stepped up to train me in orthopedic surgery… maybe some other time.  But my point is that humility can be an expression of love whether it is directed toward God or toward others.  We can’t do it all by ourselves, and how true of a joy it is to be helped by your brothers and sisters.  One verse kept running through my head all week as the medical brigade team worked and relaxed with one another.  From Psalm 133:1, “How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!”  Now this isn’t some special state of being reserved for people who go on mission trips and only for when they are on mission trips.  This is the way God intended for life to be lived all the time.  Where you are now.  With the people who are near you now.

The good news of the gospel doesn’t leave us with any room for complaining or stubbornness or complacency or self-centeredness.  Even though we can still struggle with each (as I do), the gospel only leaves room for praise, willingness, motivation, and love.  When we get involved in each other’s lives, and we start genuinely caring and empathizing and helping, then we’ve done it.  We’ve stepped into the gospel.  It doesn’t have to be in a faraway land.  It’s not something that only happened two thousand years ago.  It’s something alive, active, and powerful.  Powerful enough to bring us joy in sharing the sorrows of others.  Powerful enough to overcome our past and look toward our future.  Powerful enough to mend relationships we’ve given up on.  Powerful enough to completely transform everything we’d ever thought we had known.  And the best part is that it’s simple.  Maybe not always easy, but it’s simple.  Love one another.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” – John 13:35

So love it is.  We should all strive to do our best to show – and to gratefully receive – love.  As I have been humbled, I have also been overwhelmingly reassured.  It is not just our family that is responsible for accomplishing this work in Honduras.  It will only be accomplished through the love of God and the love of others that is so strong that I know this cannot fail.  I’m thrilled to watch God’s work as it unfolds, in Honduras, and here in Michigan, and everywhere else in between and beyond.

Thank you so much for checking this out, and feel free to enter your email to follow the blog if you haven’t already.  That way, you’ll get an email whenever we post.  If you’re on a computer, that spot should be in the upper right, and if you’re on mobile, that spot should be below.

Beyond that, there are a few more links on our About page if you’d like to check out more about the organizations we’ve been working with.  And please, always feel free to contact us anytime.  One way to do so is to use our Contact page.

God is good.  Keep an eye out for him in your life.

It’s a dangerous thing to tell God you’re ready to follow him.

It’s also an absolutely wonderful thing.

When we started going to Harderwyk Church a few years back, I caught wind that they had a week-long mission trip to Honduras planned annually in the summer.  Knowing that Stephanie had lived in Honduras for a semester in college, I thought, “Oh great, she’s gonna drag me down there one of these years.”  Sure enough, she did.  Man, it was not at all what I expected.

For the last seven years, Harderwyk Church has donated to and helped build schools in the Abundant Life Christian School network in Honduras.  This would be the second year that the team would be able to stay in the mission house at Talitha Cumi, a farm that is close to the school and is home to more than thirty young Honduran girls who might not otherwise have a safe home.

Before the trip, sometime during lent, even though nothing particularly bad was going on in my life, I experienced a deep sense that I was missing out on something.  I was just kind of sick of trying to run my own life, with all the measurements of society that we use to determine whether we’re successes or failures.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, things seemed to be going just fine, but underneath all the fineness, I just could not deny that there was clearly more intended for our lives.  And by “our lives,” I don’t mean just me, or even just the Joyce’s… I mean all human beings.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” – C.S. Lewis

During the months leading up to the trip, I was really nervous.  Those who are travelers or who have gone on mission trips before might be amused by this, but I had never been out of the country before unless you count an all-inclusive in Mexico (which doesn’t count), and I still haven’t even been to Canada.

So anytime this one song would come on by the band Lord Huron, it really put me at ease.  It’s called “Ends of the Earth” and even though Honduras isn’t exactly the ends of the earth, I just really felt a strong spiritual calm coming through it… an excitement without anxiety.  And sure, the song is a secular one written about a girl, but who cares?  You think God doesn’t work through this stuff?

We arrived in Honduras (at Talitha Cumi in Yamaranguila), ate, slept, went to church, played some soccer, and hung out with the girls at the farm.  So far, so good.  The first day we worked hauling wheelbarrows of freshly mixed wet concrete, and naturally, I went back to our mission house that night and barfed… because that’s just what my body does when you make it do manual labor.

The next couple days went much better, and Wednesday night, we were treated to a dinner at a nice restaurant in town.  We were having a great time hanging out and talking to the full time missionaries who live there when I started noticing that they were playing some really good tunes, so I started paying attention.  If you know me, you know this is a rare occurrence even in America, but there was some major chill alternative indie stuff going on, and I was loving it… there was even an instrumental Radiohead thing at one point.  Then I heard it.  Of course.  It was “The Ends of the Earth” by Lord Huron, and I was just a little stunned.  “Coincidence,” I thought.  So I asked the local translator if Lord Huron was maybe a big thing in Honduras to explain it away.  “Who?  Nope, never heard of them,” he said.

After working another day and a half, on Friday, we went to a different town (Gracias) to see another one of the schools in this same network of Abundant Life Christian Schools.  While walking around the campus, someone pointed up at Mount Celaque and said, “By the way, that’s the tallest peak in Honduras.”  Now for some perspective, I grew up in Oil City, Pennsylvania, a hilly little town in western PA.  My mom had told me repeatedly growing up that God had told her that he would keep her and her family safe in the hills of Oil City, to which I probably usually thought, “Ok, yeah, fine mom, that’s cool.”  But when I looked up at Mount Celaque, I didn’t hear an audible voice, but I did experience an instant and indelible impression that that was God’s way of telling me that he would keep me and my family safe in the mountains of Honduras.

But I still didn’t get it.

So we got home and had a group meeting a couple weeks later.  I had had the feeling of, “What now, God?!” an awful lot over those two weeks.  After our group had eaten dinner and talked a bit, I overheard the school director (who was in the US for the rest of the summer) say to someone else, “We really need math teachers in Gracias.”  Boom.  That was it.  That was what I would want to do and that is the town where I would want to do it.  I’ve always wanted to teach.  I just thought it would be in America in my retirement, not in Honduras in my thirties.  And since then, Stephanie told me about this medical clinic in the same town that’s overseen by an organization she actually studied when she lived in Honduras years ago.  The pieces just kept falling into place.

So I will be teaching math at the school in Gracias for the 2017-2018 school year, and Stephanie will be volunteering at the clinic, and perhaps teaching a class at the school as well.  We will be moving there near the end of July, and before that, we are headed with a medical brigade to the clinic February 4-11.  Hopefully I will be of some use to them as we also seek to get our bearings in the town of Gracias.  In my next post, I hope to tell you more about that trip.

There’s so much more to the story, but I didn’t want to bore you with too many details too soon.  Hopefully, this will be a good and entertaining way for us to continue to share with you our story… that is, God’s story, though us.  More importantly, however, my prayer is that by telling our story, God can breathe life into the words of Jeremiah 29:11 for you, which apply to each and every person reading this: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”  These aren’t some empty words from a fairy tale.  These are the inspired, living words of the living Lord.  Let them take root in your heart.  Let them not be hindered by fear, but let the mercy of God lead you into faithful action to grow you into the beautiful creation he intended you to be since before the existence of the universe.  He has an incredible plan for every one of us.  There are no exceptions.

And you can’t assume you have to start by going to some foreign country.  That would be absurd and boring if God called everyone in the same way.  And you can’t assume it’s all going to happen quickly.  But I can promise you that even if it isn’t quick, it does begin right now.  If you think you need to wait around for big “signs” like some of the things I’ve written about, I should like to point out that they are actually more of an indication of my own stubbornness than they are of anything else.  Don’t wait until God has to beat you over the head.  I would venture an educated guess that God has already been calling out to you from within in some way.  It’s up to you whether to nurture or suppress that call.  Both ways will be challenging, but only the first will be good.

If you choose to nurture God’s call in your life, the first step you must take is to enter into relationship with him – a real relationship – that is full of trust and mercy and a faithful disregard for your own plans.  This is a relationship where you simply get out of the way in your own life, and let God do his thing.  You will get something so much better in exchange, I promise.