"Will you go?" they begged, over and over.
And every time they asked this question I cried, "Yes! Yes! I WILL go! Pick me! Send me! I'll go!" (I cried this silently, within my heart, because the mood was always very solemn on such occasions, and I was a very good little eight-year-old girl when I was at church.)
Thus began a twenty-year obsession with ethnic food and tree houses and Jane Goodall and pretty much anything having anything at all to do with anything even remotely related to Africa. (As a side note, I find it somewhat ironic that these Sunday school teachers seemed to be painting as bleak a picture as possible of the situation. And the more dangerous and savage it all sounded, the more I fantasized about it.)
And so, when I graduated from college, put in my one year notice (yes....one year...I don't rush into things) at my then-job, and notified the management (upper-upper-management...that being God) that I was now available to go to Africa and save the lost tribes of the Congo (and eat bugs and give up hot showers) I think I half-expected Him to thank me profusely and put me on the next flight to a grass hut.
But He did not do this.
While I was busy spending endless late-night hours googling third-world missions organizations and emailing contacts in Lesotho and Mauritania, God was busy making arrangements for the actual next chapter of my life...thirty miles from my hometown. I was exhausting myself trying to kung-fu-kick down closed doors and stacking milk crates to climb in high windows, oblivious to the fact that God had just blown off the entire south-facing wall. (I'd like to think that God wasn't really frustrated with me during this whole time that I was barking up the wrong tree. That instead, maybe he was happy to have me distracted and out of the way while he did all the prep work. I'd like to think that.)
So one morning - four months before my declared "last day" - I was working at the clinic. I had just returned (literally - I'd pulled into town just six hours earlier) from a missions trip to the Dominican Republic and upon clocking-in had told my boss that yes, I would be taking Jesus to a jungle...just as soon as He, you know, gave me a lead...of any kind...at all. The trip had been a sort-of "testing the waters" for me and after a week of hauling bricks and learning Spanish hymns and hugging little Dominican children I had decided that the water was perfect and I was ready to dive in. Right now. Any moment. Just say when. All systems go.
On my lunch break that day I checked my voice mail and had a message from Corey, the area director of Young Life, the youth ministry I had been volunteering with for the last five years. He wanted to hire me. To start Young Life in Hill City. Today.
So I did what any reasonable girl would do. I locked myself in a podiatry exam room and called my mom while having one of those low-grade, jetlag/"I'm-in-my-early-twenties-and-I-have-an-ill-defined-idea-of-God's-will-for-my-life" induced anxiety attacks. The conversation, in short: my mom pointed out that I loved working with Young Life. I loved the hills. They actually wanted to hire me. And that for the last two years every plan I had cooked up to do ministry overseas had fallen apart. (She may have also said something about not letting me ever live in a different zip code than herself - not over her dead body. But that part of our chat is a little fuzzy.)
She's a wise woman, that mother of mine.
Four months later I came on Young Life staff.
Shortly after accepting the job, while I was still feeling a little shaky about my decision to commit to being in America for an undetermined amount of time, I ran across the parable in the book of Matthew, where Jesus says that "he who is faithful with little will be entrusted with much". I told myself that that is what God was doing with me right then. Giving me little (Hill City) to see if I could handle much (a third-world country).
I was an idiot.
To think that the kids in Hill City (population 970) were somehow less significant to God, that he wanted me to go there to "practice" ministry and then when I had honed my skills he would turn me loose on something more glamorous and noticeably self-sacrificing...well, like I said, I was being really dumb about my whole philosophy of calling and God's will, and greatly misapplying Jesus' words.
As I began to get to know the kids in Hill City, to hear their stories and see their pain, to be invited into their lives, to love them, to laugh with them, I realized that I was being given so, SO much. I began to be filled with a sort-of overwhelming, divine sense of responsibility. My job here was no longer something to be taken lightly, to be seen as some sort of dues I needed to pay before I got what I really was aiming at.
I've been in Hill City three-and-half years. Getting to share Jesus with all these amazing, hilarious, wonderful high school students. I have been blessed and broken and stretched WAY further than I could ever have imagined.
I do have electricity. I do have running water. I don't have malaria. But I do have a tree-house in my yard that I can sleep in whenever I feel like it.
I still dream about Africa. I got to go there and love on beautiful Swazi people for a week in 2009, and it was amazing. I still feel this tug to share Christ with one of the hundreds of people groups in the planet who have no access to the gospel, and to help meet their physical needs for food and shelter and medical attention, and to seek social justice for them, and to learn their languages and customs. I still daydream about raising my own children someday in a country where a culture of entitlement and self-centeredness isn't pervasive. I still hope to live in a grass hut.
Maybe God is preparing me for that. Maybe God is preparing me for something I haven't even dreamed up yet. Maybe God is preparing me to stay in Hill City for a long time. Who knows? But as long as I'm here, I'm going to strive to be faithful with the so much I've been given.
