The battle for my spirit.

 25/4/11

I’ve tried to write something for my blog this last week, but my mind just isn’t seeing the humor.  I realize humor is what helps deal with the frustrations – the vast different-ness of living in another culture.  I read I Corinthians 6:20 the other day, “For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, AND IN YOUR SPIRIT, which are God’s.”  Obviously, the emphasis is mine. However, as I read it the other day, the emphasis was that of the Holy Spirit’s. 

May I be perfectly honest with you?  Please understand that I want to serve God.  I want to please Him.  I want to be anywhere He wants me to be.  I desperately want to see His face some day and hear Him say that I pleased Him.  I want to tell people how to go to heaven and hear them say, “Thank you for coming all this way to tell me this.”  But my flesh!  It wants to be where I’m familiar with what’s going on around me – not where there’s a constant uneasiness as to how I should handle a situation.  My flesh wants to be where I can go to the store and buy what I’m looking for, for the same price others pay – not the price they charge the white man.  My flesh wants to be clean and comfortable – not hot, sticky and dirty from road dust and diesel as I walk or ride in a taxi wherever I’m going.  My flesh wants to go back to the mountains of Colorado and hike for hours on end, hearing and smelling nothing but nature and praising God for His beautiful creation – not seeing trash every where, smelling things that are rotting, or hearing rock and roll or reggae music blasting in my ears from churches and taxi speakers.  These are the things that wear away at my spirit and cause me to fight a battle each day to tell myself I can’t allow those thoughts of going back to what’s comfortable.  Not to a location, but to a place in time when my life was comfortable – when I had my dream job of flight nursing, was 20 minutes from the mountains, had the strength and vigor of youth, had my home church where I could attend every service and activity, and my best friends surrounded me.

But I’m bought with a price.  My body and my spirit are His.  It does no good to give Him my body by coming to Africa and submitting to all this, but then let my spirit drag around being miserable.  He purchased both.  I’m to glorify God with both. 

While I see this great failure in my life right now, I praise Him that, as He so often does, He has responded to this failure with gentleness and blessings.  He has given me missionary families that allowed me to come over and visit, who fed me a wonderful dinner and let me watch a DVD with their kids sitting around me on Easter Sunday.  He has given cooler temperatures with a little bit of rain, allowing me to sleep through the night.  He has brought visitors to church that I invited the day before.  He has allowed me to share the gospel and see one bow their head to trust Christ – the first person I’ve seen do that in Africa.  He has allowed me to download my pastor’s sermons, and sermons from other godly preachers.  He has allowed me to talk with a godly, older missionary couple that can no longer serve on a foreign field because of their health.  He has allowed me to keep up with my friends via skype and email.  He’s given me a pastor that would spend on hour talking with me, giving me counsel and just checking to see how I’m doing.  He’s given me a pastor’s wife that emails or calls to give me updates on my home church.  He has given me prayer partners around the world that not only pray but also send me notes to remind me they’re praying.  He has given me more than I could possibly comprehend!  And just reminding myself of these blessings makes me love Him more.

Forgive my transparency.  But as I tell the Lord often, I am not ‘big and strong’.  I’m made of the same human flesh as the worst of sinners.  My strength is in Him.  He is my refuge.