Chapter 2
Sometimes the confidence you once felt as certain seems to fade as you go through the uncertainty of life. I was in the middle of a senior year with an internship at a crisis pregnancy center, counseling partners of women coming in for pregnancy testing and men who were coming in for STD testing. I didn’t feel like I was a great counselor, and made some mistakes along the way, like leaving a voicemail for a man on his family landline about how he was doing after his STD testing. That was a big opps moment for me, one I still feel embarrassed about to this very day. I also remembering declining to cancel a man coming in for STD testing because he had come to the center many times for testing. I just felt like my words would don’t nothing for this man, and that I couldn’t change the circumstances his life found Himself in. That internship and being busy with college studies seem to cause me great stress and made me question if I choose the wrong major to study in college.
One reason why I felt that God couldn’t use me was because of unwanted sexual thoughts that were plaguing my mind. I didn’t know what to do with this thoughts, as they tormented me, causing me to have headaches and migraines of many sorts. I decided to go to a place that offered free counseling. I decided to get help for this problem in my life. For awhile it did help, as I they even helped me through suicidal thoughts I was having during this time. I thought they could help me see the light at the end of the tunnel for this problem. But they weren’t of much help at all, with their probing of me and my thoughts, took me to places I didn’t want my mind to go.
A deep fog was over my mind as they threaten to cut my off from important people in my life. The only people who knew of this struggle besides the counselor were my parents and a trusted counselor in Maryland. What should have been a very joyful time for me in my senior year was the worst year of my life. I ended up, quitting counseling a week before my senior year ended. I just couldn’t take it anymore, with finals slowly approaching, and my life slowly unraveling before me. Also in the midst of all this, I thought I heard God’s call to go into the same master program where my counseling was coming out from.
As I graduated from college, I returned back to my home in Maryland. I was even more uncertain about my future as I was waiting to hear back my results from the graduate school I was applying to. When I found out that I was not accepted, I was saddened, but also breathed a sign of relief. I got in the mindset that I had to find a job, and pay off loans. It was a hard season to find a job after the recession of 2008. It was hard to believe in myself and my abilities and made me wonder if I would ever make an impact in the world like Dave and Steven Curtis Chapman had done for me. If I could even make a small impact in the world, I would be happy with that, but even jobs such as tutoring GED students didn’t seem to satisfy my desire to make an impact in the world around me.
But if I look into that chapter of my life once again, I am reminded of my childhood years once again. I grew up in a great Christian home, as my parents were a living example to me how a walk with Jesus looked like. I remember my dad going on his knees downstairs in the living room, with an afghan wrapped around him. I said to myself that I wanted to be a man liked that when I grew up. I just hoped that one day, I could be taller than him! My dad is short man in stature- about 5’4. So I was very happy when I grew to an inch taller than him! My dad was a deacon at my church, as well as a great support to my mom as she started a ministry for special needs children. But I felt uncertain at times, that I could ever be a man like my father.
I had struggles in my learning development growing up, as I didn’t speak until age 3. Even when I did speak, I had a speaking impediment that was a hindrance in me making friends with my peers. I didn’t believe in myself and doubted whether my life would amount to much. Yes, my parents believed in me, but that was about it I have told of how my youth pastor Dave played an impact in my life in those formative years. But I have yet to tell of two other men who played an impact in my life growing up. These men were Bob and Adam.
Bob was one of my youth leaders when I was in sixth grade. He was a hefty, big man with a gray bird with an English accent. I remember on many of our youth group trips just sitting and talking with me when my peers seem to care less for me. He was a comforting presence to me, a grandfather figure to a boy who had lost both of his grandfathers by age 9. He communicated love to me in a way no one outside of my family had done for me. Perhaps it was in light of his example to me, I was inspired to live out my walk with Christ in front of my peers at my Christian school. You see even when I didn’t have many friends, there was always inside of me a heart for God and people. Bob put that desire inside of me to have a heart for God and people.
Adam was one of my youth pastors in high school. He was about 10 years older than me, and was broad in structure. He was like the big brother I didn’t have growing up. I ended up helping him and another youth pastor Kevin with various administrative duties they needed. I loved that they believed in me enough to entrust me with a level of responsibility in their ministry. But Adam did more than gave me responsibility, I saw in him what a genuine, daily walk with Jesus looked like. I remember seeing in him as he preached a genuine desire to use his story to make Jesus known to people. It was attractive to this young man, who didn’t known if he could ever use his story to make Jesus known to people. I am thankful for Adam every day for showing up and living out his life before God- following Jesus in every step he took in life.
So God had a way of showing me that He uses ordinary people to make a difference in the lives of people. I just didn’t always believe God could use me, as one of his ordinary people, to make a difference to others.
God seemed to answer the cry of my heart to make an impact in the world around me when he presented an opportunity to go on a mission trip to Kenya with my church. I was excited and full of joy in the opportunity to serve God in a new country!! But enrollee to Kenya, I lost my passport on a plane to Amsterdam. When I realized I lost it, it was a hour before we were to board for Kenya. The stewardesses looked all over the airplane trying to find the passport, but couldn’t find it. I could stay in Amsterdam to get a new passport, but would have to wait the weekend to get an appointment for the passport. One of the leaders of the trip would stay with me if I made this choice. However, I didn’t want to hinder the mission of the trip so made the hard choice to go back home to Maryland as I still had a copy of passport with me. As I made the decision to board that plane, I cried like I never had before in my own life. When my own grandmother died, I hadn’t cried at all. But here I was crying, because I was upset at the door that seemed to be closed in making an impact in the world around me.
However, out of that great pain, God presented an even better opportunity to make an impact in the world around me. My mission pastor, Tom, told me of an opportunity to spent a few months in Kenya with a great missionary organization- Christian Missionary Fellowship that my church had a great partnership with over the years. I took some time to pray over it with God, however one night that was crucial in my decision making. I tossed and turned in bed one night as I was wrestling with this decision. Then I said to God, “Okay God. I will go”, making a firm decision in my heart to go and play apart in the work God was up to in Kenya.
When I went to Kenya, I was confronted with the most abject poverty I have ever had. Slums filled with shacks with tin on the roof. Homes the size of living rooms in the States, sometimes with six people living in them. There were dirty streams of water with bags filled with human waste. Children who had an ugly stench on them, with hole-filled clothes. Disease was rampant as AIDS and malaria destroyed the lives of many families. I didn’t know what to do with poverty. I wondered many times what God was up to and why these people were suffering so much.
Yet, I saw light in the darkness that wanted to consume light. Light through an organization called Mission of Hope International who was worked to empower and strengthen families using the good news of the Gospel through schools, community development programs, business loans, and other avenues. All with a profound understanding that true caring for others is holistic, caring about their physical and their spiritual needs. That true poverty is spiritual poverty, not realizing the need for a Savior in a messed up broken world.
This light pushed me through my darkest days in Kenya, giving me the strength to share the good news of the Gospel to people who hadn’t heard much of the good news of the Gospel. Even in the darkest of my self, the light had a way of penetrating through. Often I was so caught up in doing work for God with the people in Kenya, that I forgot part of the work wanted me to do was to be simply with my team mates. To be with my team mates, enjoy life with them, and be the hands and feet of Jesus to them as much as the people in Kenya. When I relaxed and simply be my goofy, silly self with them, I was becoming more of the person God created me to be. Like dancing to the song Footloose with my team leader’s son David, doing all the silly motions and playing air guitar. Like going on a grass pasture and approaching a cow, not knowing if I would be harmed in any way. When I was care free in the anxiousness of my own heart, I didn’t care if people heard my loud voice saying Glee songs in my bed room. Such moments of joy were also rays of light, communicating through it, that if I rested in the center of God’s will, I could truly be a blessing to all people I came in contact with, through the people on the streets, to my team-mates.
God also had a way of showing me through the light, that it was not about me and my desires to serve him. It was giving him permission to invade my every day coming and goings, seeing himself through ordinary people. Like a child named Maria, crippled by cerebral palsy- a death sentence in Kenyan society. Her own family didn’t see her God- given worth and passed her around like a burden. She was often just left behind in her wheelchair all by herself. Yet, in the first time, I met Maria, I was just saddened by the condition of her life and how often she was ignored and devalued.
Yet my teammate Hannah, who was with me that day, when we met Maria, asked me if I saw Jesus in her. I said No, and wondered why this was so. Yet, I was determined in the next time, I would meet Maria, that I would try to see Jesus in her. When I met Maria again, I knelt down to her level on my knees, touched her hands, and looked into her eyes. It was if God was saying to me, “Look, you have found me.” It was a quick visit, and everyone wanted to go forward with other home visits. But I just wanted to stay there as God met me in that moment in a way he hadn’t done so in all of my life.
It was through children like Maria that I saw hope and light together, creating a beautiful rainbow of colors, that proclaimed the greatness and splendor of our God who cares for each of us deeply more than we ever know or imagine. I was often at peace within myself, as I felt in the center of God’s will just as I was in Uganda. It was a joy to see God on the move as the laughter and noises of children filled my ears. To lift up in the air those children with a dirty stench, showing them love in ways perhaps others hadn’t. To preach and teach the Gospel in simple ways through a evangel-cube that shared in a simple way the message of the Gospel. It challenged me to think about what the Gospel really meant to me and how to explain it to one who didn’t know it. To preach sermons and proclaim truth to a people who were on fire for God and to a people who needed the good news of the gospel to engulf all their lives.
When I had to leave to go back to the States, I was upset and didn’t want to leave. I want to stay there forever. Yet, as I would later discovered, that God had even bigger ways to use me to make an impact in the world around me.
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