Take a Chance!

I wish there was a magic fairy-dust that you could sprinkle on yourself as soon as you decided to "work for Jesus" that would take away all the bad habits and false motives and lazy attitudes and leave you with nothing but joyful selflessness, good favor with everyone, and an extra heap of wisdom.  But at the same time? I'm very glad there isn't!  There is breathtaking beauty in the journey from Point A to Point B and it has a lot to do with depending on God every day because I don't have it all together!  

Sometimes I think we expect moving to a different place to come with at least a free sample of some such fairy-dust, but... it doesn't.  Wouldn't ya know, I moved all the way to Guatemala and I’m still the same Renae.  In a lot of ways, my life looks a lot like it did in the States.  Some nights, I stay up too late and sleep through my alarm in the morning.  I leave dirty dishes in the sink for too many days and it takes twice as long to clean them.  I wear my hair in odd up-dos at night so it will dry curly but some days it just doesn’t.  I spend too much time on some projects and then I have to rush to finish others.  I can’t decide which brand of peanut butter to buy at the store and just last week I let a sweet old lady at the market talk me into buying way too much broccoli for any one single person to consume and it’s going bad in my fridge because I just don't know what to do with it all!

Dance party in the kitchen! 

In a lot of ways, not much has changed! But at the same time, little by little, I’m learning about how trauma affects children and what we can do to help them.  Little by little, I’m learning how to love people who are really difficult and confusing to love, how to set good boundaries for myself and also for the girls I interact with who don’t yet have their own moors.  Little by little, I'm learning how to share truth when it’s time to share truth and how to listen when it’s time to listen.   And in the learning, I mess it all up.   
Mucho.  
Often.  
Because as much as I would like to get it right the first time, I’m quite human.  I quite honestly don’t know what to do in many, many situations every single day. But even there… there’s something fragile and weak and dependent and beautiful about who God made me to be. At the end of the day, I’m a recovering rebel who is loved by a holy God. In each and every daily, boring, exciting, overwhelming thing that comes up, I have a chance to see God’s strength perfected in the filling of my weaknesses. Am I willing to take it?
 

Love from a very weak, very happy 23-yr-old!

“My salvation and my significance depend ultimately on God; the core of my strength, my shelter, is in the True God.”   Psalm 62:7