Every day I have to readjust my perspective. It's so easy to be near sighted. I always need to keep myself in check that the person I'm following is Jesus Christ. He is my leader and when I keep my eyes on him, everything will fall into place. I need to focus on Him and let him direct my path.
I realize in my everyday living that I'm always in need of a leader whether it's in the organization I am serving at, in my church, in my home, in my social setting, whatever it is. Internally, I'm always looking for that leader so that I can follow and when I follow, I follow wholeheartedly. Im blessed to have wonderful leaders in my life but I realize that that in itself is nearsighted too because I'm not following THE leader, I'm focusing too much on following the human leaders path.
How much more amazing to follow the leader of all leaders. When I do that, then I won't feel so bad about moving on and entering different transitions. When I do that, I'm being faithful to my current circumstances but when it's time to go, there will be no hard feelings because we are going where the big boss wants to take us.
I think about that often, especially because I'm in then process of transitioning church families and I'm also graduating next year. People often ask me what I'm going to do next? Internally, I feel pressured to come up with a response to show that I have everything planned out. But it seems that every step of my life, none of my plans were God's plans for me. Everything chapter of my life has been literally paved by God, so why stress out so much over it? I have thoughts about wanting to stay in the job I'm currently at because I love my team and my boss. They all have stayed so long and I wish I could do that too, but why pressure myself? I'll go where God leads. I need to follow the leader and stop planning my own life out so stringently.
In small group the other day, we were reading John 10 and it talked about how sheep knows the voice of the shepherd and it follows it. The sheep know the shepherd and the shepherd know the sheep. The are always going in God's leading and no matter how stupid they are, at least they are following their shepherd.
It's weird, but there are more moments than less where I feel like I don't belong. All my life, I've always been in some way, the odd ball out, I don't care about the extra necessities in life. I just need enough to survive, everything else is extra. I just want to get to the basics, where it's just about loving God and loving people. It might be because of the way I was raised, it might just be my personality. When I have conversations with people or when I am just hanging out with others, it's just different. Nothing wrong with them, nothing wrong with me, it is what it is. There are many times I feel that I don't fit in, I don't belong? Is it because I'm Christian? I don't think so because they are Christian as well. Is it because I'm still waiting on the assignment that God will be giving me and until then I'm just called to be faithful? Until then, I'm called to just be content in where I am, assimilate. Although I appreciate it, for me, I don't enjoy eating food that costs enough to feed a whole village. I don't care enough to keep up with fashion, buy the trendiest things, spend money on extra necessities that does not necessarily add value to my life. I am not so fascinated by the newest music that comes out or the new movies that show in theaters. I do not care enough to spend the time entertaining my life with things that do not add value and build or encourage me in my walk with God. There are people that have told me that I deserve better, I should be getting paid more, and although I do wish that because expenses never seem to go away, all I want to do is serve at a place where their mission and vision is kingdom related. It seems that I've been called to the current one I'm at now and so far so good, but I don't think this is the end, I feel like there's something else. I've been to plenty of places where people have less, where people live on less, where people almost have nothing and outer appearance isn't the most important. I'm not sure if I belong there either, but there's always been a tugging in my heart that my home might not be here and it might be elsewhere, since the first day I ever experienced outside soil. It's funny because the more I get exposed to just loving people who have less and giving my life up to share the love of Jesus, I have a different feeling in my heart. I feel eagerness, I feel excitement, I feel yearning and I just don't know when and how and what's going to happen. Will it happen sooner than later? I hope one day it'll be at a place where I can successfully learn the language of the people so that it will be easier to relate and communicate. But I see the lifestyle that some people around me live. I want to do that. I don't so much want to do this. But, I'll do it and I'll learn to like it until then. Until then, God, I thank you for allowing me to live comfortably for this long, I thank you for the family, friends, and the different environments you've allowed me to experience. Thank you for always providing, thank you for your protection, thank you for your guidance and providence.
I've been on many mission trips over the past couple of years and every single mission trip has been different in so many ways. I'm so encouraged to see the way that God uses people and how the gospel is reached to the masses.
This summer, I had the opportunity to visit Ecuador, specifically the oriente region of Ecuador, about four hours away from Quito with my current church. We lived in a newly built mission home in Tena, Ecuador and traveled to three different villages over the course of ten days, all of which are quite a distance from each other and all of which are located in the amazonian rain forest.
Ila-Yaku
CampaCocha (the people of this village spoke both Spanish and Kichwa)
Cuni-pare (most people of this village spoke Huaorani)
I traveled on this missions trip with a Korean church who worked with a Korean missionary that has been living there for five years and who is being supported by five small local churches in NY. It was quite difficult to communicate with everyone there because my brother and I were the only Chinese people there and every else either spoke Korean or Spanish. Fortunately, there were a handful of people who spoke a little bit of English and I was able to converse with. I was able to understand a little more about the culture, the missionaries, the things they were doing there.
As a short-term missionary, I acknowledge that I cannot do much there, especially because I did not speak the language well and half the time, I had to rely on my handy dandy Spanish English dictionary which helped me converse the locals there. So in my mind, I was there to just love on the members in the areas that the missionary has already established a church family at. The great thing about missions is that we get to share lives with so many brothers and sisters in Christ around the world, the sad thing about it is that we develop a relationship with them but it's not likely that we will see them again, or merely just a couple of times in our lives. The only thing we can do is pray for them and possibly support in any way we can.
I learned so much about the missionary and his heart and passion and drive and it made me look at missions and life calling in a different perspective. The missionary we worked with lived a complete life, he was a teacher in Korea. Only after he retired did he move to Ecuador to become a full time missionary and he is living off of his pension. Every dollar used to support the missions goes straight to mission work and not to his own pocket. When I heard his story, I learned that he was impacted by a missionary, David Ross, who had a heart to missions in Korea when he in high school. I learned that the missionary we were working with had a very hard life as a kid. His father ran away from home when he was young and his mother was too stressed to take care him so she went on to marry someone else. This missionary was left alone to fend for himself for all of his life. He was exposed to church because the people there made it fun for him to learn the Bible but none of the teachings sank into his heart until one day he met David Ross, the missionary. Since then, God transformed his life and gave him a heart for missions. Today, he serves full time in Ecuador. Throughout the trip, he hosted not just us, the NY team in the mission home but also some members to help throughout the whole mission trip, about ten of them, all of them were between the ages 14-18 and seems like he has been helping them develop in their faith. He's been training them, doing daily devotionals with them, teaching them christian songs, loving them, teaching them, showing them what it means to be a Christian. I was very encouraged by what he was doing and the impact that he was making on these youth.
He is one of the few missionaries that we met in Ecuador, we met a handful of other Korean missionaries that moved to Ecuador full time. I was only able to hear one testimony of another couple there because they had time to spend with us during parts of the trip, and they spoke just enough English to converse. It's encouraging to see these older folks live up their calling and go where God calls them and leads them. They learned the language of the people, live amongst the people, and pours into the lives amongst all these people. I pray that God would use my family and I in this capacity or a different capacity as we continuously walk in Him whether its in my hometown or elsewhere. It's just amazing to see how God uses people and how unique it is for every single person. I've encountered so many different people and all of them are used by God in such inspiring ways. People who serve God get mistreated, taken advantage of, misunderstood, but all in all, that does not stop them from the calling God has for them.
This is a link of a glimpse of what we did there. There were a lot of other things we did but this was the bulk of our mission: http://youtu.be/oTr7Hzw3Y5E
