Maiden Blog!

Well, this is the beginning of what may shape up to be a week of many firsts for me. This will be my first time to Peru, my first time south of the Equator, and most pertinent at this very moment – my first time blogging. So, at the risk of completely doing this wrong and allowing the rest of the world to see how out of touch I truly am, here goes.

It is coming up on T minus 4 hours until we depart Madison. Wrapping up things at work and going over my packing list for the sixth and seventh times has left me exhausted, but too nervous and excited to get much sleep accomplished. I find myself coming back to the same nagging question…what am I going to do in Peru?

I have thought about this over and over during the past several months. I look around the room at our team meetings and I can envision how God will use the people around me to accomplish His goals. And somehow I come back to myself and am still left wondering. The annoying mantra returns – what can I do, what can I do? I have spent far too much energy comparing myself to the spiritual leaders I have known in my life, or study in the Bible, and of course find myself lacking.

And then it hits me, like it has an embarrassing number of times before – it’s not about me. Now, I resent this on principle (I’m quite sure that every ounce of me is shocked and disgusted at the mere suggestion – how can it not be about me? Especially when I am so good at making myself the focus?). But regardless, the truth of the matter is, that it is in fact not about me. There is nothing really that I could plan that would come close at all to what God could envision. So rather than striving and straining in vain to develop some woefully inadequate plan for what I will do, I will crazily step aside and let the Creator of the universe do His work. I will show up, willing to be used, willing to learn- albeit apparently not naturally insightful- and willing to open myself up to a bigger picture. And as earnestly as I believe at this moment, in my comfortable home while sleep eludes me, that I am completely willing to accept that I do not have God’s vision or wisdom and yet will trust Him anyway, I actually do know that I will likely have to learn and re-learn this again and again even in the next week. I guess in a way it really is a miracle that God can use broken humans like us, like me, to do anything good. Thank God He is patient!

So thank you to those of you who will pray for me, I think I will need it!

Hasta luego,

Emily