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So the question is, when you feel a call to missions... what do you do with it?
A call to missions can be confusing and intimidating. Our first thought is, “Okay God, I hear you… but, what does this mean? Do I need to sell everything, buy some sandals and a water-bottle and move to a remote place?” No. Maybe? Who are we to say?
But, while suddenly throwing everything out the door and heading to another country is a somewhat noble thought, it could be needless and disorienting. For many of us, the real challenge and first step is making sense of what our specific call to missions looks like. For some people, it may look like a radical life-change like we described above, but for most of us, it comes about in smaller changes to our normal life.
So you’ve come home from a mission trip on fire for God and declaring the Gospel among the nations. Your passion is boiling over. Your heart is screaming, “More! More!” You believe you are ready to follow God anywhere. But then what happens? Life happens. And you find yourself facing the question of giving up everything you’ve ever know to move across the country, or the world - in pursuit of what exactly? A spark in your chest? The passion in your soul? A calling from God?
And then suddenly your passion comes face-to-face with the tension of losing everything you love and everything you’ve worked for, to pursue God. This tends to be where you may lose the spiritual inertia you picked up on the mission field.
It’s no lie, we gravitate towards extremes. We tend to try and live our faith in extremes as well. The problem with extremes is they evoke extreme emotions. But with all that said, we know emotions are vastly important, God gave us emotions to help guide us, connect us to others, to problem solve, to cope and to amplify the power of moments. And generally, moments that are directly connected to an emotion tend to stick in our brains better than others - they move us more deeply. Like when you fell off your bike going down the big hill, your pain and disappointment may have colored in the details of that event so vividly that you can still remember what it felt like all those years ago. Or when you finally walked across the stage at graduation, the pride and joy you felt cemented that moment in your memory forever.
However, emotions aren’t the most reliable when discerning complex decisions that can affect the whole course of your life! When we are operating in the extremes, we rarely respond well to practicality. Coming home from a mission trip and trying to discern your life’s calling is an impossible task. Don’t feel like you have to make a decision today. So, we want to encourage you to stop what you are doing - take a breath - and do these 5 things:
1. Tell Someone
2. Commit to a daily prayer schedule
3. Remember, anyone can be a missionary
4. The mission field is everywhere
5. You still feel the need to go? Then GO.
Ultimately, we pray that God blesses your missions journey, whatever it may look like - and we cannot wait to celebrate with all the Kingdom of God in Heaven!
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