God Called, Pt. 2

Everytime I open up the Bible, God speaks to me about missions and surrendering my career, family and friends, comfortable living, etc. It's been two weeks of a lock and hold struggle, and the conviction is just building up--all the songs, Bible verses, people He's used to get through to me--and so there's nothing for me to do but just surrender. I have such a lack of peace but I realize it's just my flesh and pride refusing to give up. I talked to my mom yesterday and she was talking about getting me connected with a doctor friend for PA school; my heart twisted cause she has no idea what I've been thinking for the past two weeks.

But following Christ demands spiritual violence. Truthfully, we Christians are still human and want as much as the next person to just give up and sit on a couch and eat chips. There isn't a month that goes by where I don't want to just throw in the towel and give up being a Christian. It's hard. But the fact that GOD is so real, and the fact that He knows everything about me and loves me still, the fact that I've received prophetic words of such exactness and power expressing this unconditional love directly from the uncreated GOD, strips me of all justification for being lukewarm. He is so real and so good, what He speaks is truth, and knowing all of this requires that we hate the world in all that distracts us from Him. Being real is loving God wholeheartedly because of how absolutely merciful He is and has been and will be toward us.

Love demands sacrifice; I can't say I love God and refuse to sacrifice anything of worth to me. All these things we do that constitute following Him: prayer, the Word, fellowship, witnessing..all are things I have come to enjoy. Who doesn't like to sing nice-sounding songs? Who doesn't like to eat with friends and spend time together with people who have the same interest? Who wouldn't like to meet new people and share a cause that has some place in our heart? All these things have become second-nature now through God's molding hands (I would never have said they were things of pleasure before), and now that I've gotten past that threshold of sacrifice with these things, He's calling me deeper into sacrificial love. Because we can't say the love of God has precedence in our lives unless there is continual sacrifice til our flesh has died and Christ lives in us.

A year and a half ago, He called me into a lifestyle of weekly fasting & daily lengthened prayer. It was a scary step to take into "hardcore" Christianity and I wasn't even willing to commit until the second altar call a week after the first during an IHOP conference. The first couple times of fasting were so difficult, but my strength lay in knowing every hunger pang was a cry for more of God. Fasting and prayer was what was so key in propelling my growth--it pushed me into that secret place with God everyday so that I'd come out fragrant with the oil of Jesus, a fire burning in my heart for the living God, a heart full of joy and full of love for the people around me. I remember some nights after an hour or two in the little chapel on campus, I would go to Bible study, look around quietly at everyone, and be amazed at how much love and adoration there was overflowing in my heart for each sister. God is a lover blinded by the good in us, and this is essentially what I was experiencing. The months after I changed the pace of my spiritual lifestyle, my outlook and attitude toward everyone began to change so noticeably it amazed me.

Now He's calling me to another change in lifestyle, to go deeper in sacrificial love for Him. Last time it was giving up two days of food and two hours a day to pray (which meant giving up my job, but that didn't really mean anything cause God provides). If I could, I would revert to my old metabolism so that I could go through those first crude weeks of fasting again just to experience His power and transformation anew. Now, in this call to missions, I'm feeling tested and tried again for what I really care about. Will I cast everything aside and, like with the hunger pangs, glory in the barrenness as proof to God that I love Him? Or will I pull a Lot's wife and look at all these things--career, all my family and friends, the financial stability/wealth, the beauty and comfort of America--and harbor them in my heart as reasons to resent God, or even clutch onto them and let the opportunity to obey slip away? To the outsider it may seem this call is nothing but painstaking and it may read as something I really don't want to do, and sometimes this is true of my struggle, but I really do know deep in my heart that His goodness is behind it all, and it's a big step into a bright future He's calling me into, plans to prosper me and not to harm me (Jer 29:11). Please keep me in your prayers.