faith and the testing of it.....

2004 was a topsy turvy year. We thought we had life all planned out. We were moving to another country but not too far. A bit out of our comfort zone but not too much, a chunk of adventure that was safe to face. But God changed our hearts to step out even further and the best thing was, that we were excited about this new direction our life was taking!

Fast forward 11 years and you can imagine our excitement when we eventually presented the Gospel message for the first time in our village! After years of preperation, learning languages, building a house, getting to know the people we were at the place of the dream God placed in our hearts! And that with a build up over a year of lessons beginning in Genesis, tracing God's redemptive story from the Garden of Eden to the crucifiction of Jesus and then on to His glorious resurrection!

All very wonderful and exciting stuff! You would think we would be over the moon! And in a way we were but....

We were battling so many things in the midst of all this amazingness. Sudden strange illnesses, huge storms with wind and hail right before the last Bible lesson, sudden onset of malaria in 3 of our workers, severe colds, dizziness, sick children, foot fungi, our well running dry, disappointment in others, funerals in the village, houses and teaching shelter being destroyed by extreme weather, etc, etc...and that was only in the last 7 days! 

It is dark days indeed! And somehow, because i thought it would be all wonderful and happy days it felt much, much worse than it already was. Ferdinant Deist wrote "it is not real life that disappoints you (or God) but your expectations of life that does (or my expectations of what God was supposed to do)."

Somehow i had this idea in my head - not consciously thought out, but there nevertheless - that it would all be lovely and good and smooth. That we would all be healthy and have enough food and money, that there would be no funerals to go to, that the rains would stay away on a Tuesday, etc, etc! I could add quite a lot more to this list of MY own expectations!

Meantime, back in the village a huge battle was being fought and it didn't quite line up with what i had in mind....and Not Surprising ..... huge disappointment set in! The Lord was not only testing the village people on the Truth that they just heard but He was also testing me to see what was in my heart! Would i keep believing that He is Almighty? Even though we had that huge storm right before the teaching? He did not change but because of my expectations it seemed like He did. The spiritual battle was fierce and we were in the middle of it all....would we still keep our eyes on the Never Changing Living God? Or would we fold and declare this is a god forsaken land with no hope, pack our bags and leave with heads hung low? 

Jeremiah 55.... "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the LORD. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is My Word that goes out from My mouth, it will not return to Me empty, but will accomplish what i desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it."

God wanted me to keep on trusting Him no matter what. And that is hard, really, really hard. In a perfect world, aka heaven, all the people would have accepted Jesus as their Saviour and bowed before the King of Kings. But this is earth and man has a free will. God loves these people with a burning love but each one needs to decide wether or not they will choose Him. Keep on choosing Him even if things get hard. Even if He does not act out my list of expectations. I needed to keep choosing to believe!!

In Romans 8 Paul wrote "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" Notice the WHO? But then, curiously, he goes on to list THINGS: trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword, facing death, considred as sheep to be slaughtered. Phew! The enemy wants us to stop loving God by using all these things to turn against our Lord. Our faith will be tested! My faith IS being tested! 

The qoute from Romans starts with the question "Who can seperate us from God's love?", but ends with a "NO!" and then gos on to say "In All these things we are More than conquerors through Him who loved us!" More than conquerors! "For i am convinced that neither death, not life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all crations (including my own fabricated expectations!)  will be able to seperate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

It is called Faith in God no matter what. Not blind faith, but faith in an unchanging God. Ferdinand Deist also said that Faith is not based on the certainty of how i think God should act, but on the certainty that He Is there. Faith in God full stop. 

So as I sit here with my painful toes, still no water, sick kids, my husband that just came back from the funeral, etc, etc i.e. nothing has changed but actually everything has changed! God is here, He loves me and the people around me, He cares and Nothing...not a thing can seperate me from that love!

And i kneel in thankfulness, more than a conqueror through Jesus who loves us!

Bella, learning to trust more day by day...