Countdowns are for lovers

Only 6 days left until I venture off to Puerto Rico for a week.  Why, you may ask?  To share the love of Christ, of course!  I'm going on a mission trip with a friend of mine's church, and how grateful I am to have the privilege of accompanying them.  There are about 40 youth going, I believe, along with a handful of chaperones.  We will be joining a group of roughly 130 other youth and adults if I am not mistaken.   It is set up through the organization World Changers, if you are indeed a web surfer.

I am an awkward non-youth/non-chap, and I am okay with that.

This post is bound to have little direction or clarity.  I am excited, so do not hold happy feelings against me.  Have a heart!  And a sense of humor...

I have been on 6 other mission trips in the past to various locations: Alabama, Kentucky, Canada, Georgia, and Chicago twice.  I am so excited to be heading a completely different direction with a completely different culture.  This trip is feeling rather special to me.  It kind of fell out of the sky, but not like the completely whimsical, careless fall from the sky that has little prayer basis.  It is more of a gift from God that kind of landed on my front doorstep, floating in slow motion (maybe in a cute little basket with a little parachute attached to it) until it was perfectly placed at the perfect time. And my front door at home has a porch covering over it.  So that God is pretty skilled, I must say.

Also, this is my first mission trip as a college student.  I have only been through one year of college, but God has taught me so much in that one year that it is one of those thoughts that requires extra effort to even attempt to sort out, and if I try to do it in one sitting, my brain fries.  It sizzles, my friends.  But those are the thoughts that I know I will be sorting out the rest of my life, those lessons I learned for reasons to be revealed in the year 2024.  I like those kinds of brain-sizzling thoughts.

I have changed a lot too.  Well, God has shaped me.  Numerous posts in the past reveal this slow transformation, this triumphal procession.  I am still intrigued by the concept of passion right now (I think it has something to do with reading Paul's letters in my quiet time for the past month or so), and how my passion has... become passion.  How my passion has originated and cultivated and accentuated and other words that end with -ated.

Passion is passion when it's all you think about.  God and everything that comes with Him...He has filled my thoughts.

Ever thought about what "comes with" God?  Interesting.  Perhaps I will save that for another post...

Let heaven fill your thoughts.  Do not think only about things down here on earth.  -Colossians 3:2

My thoughts are filled with this trip.  With what is going to happen.  With how I am going to present the gospel.  With what God is doing, what He will and can do, how much He loves those people I have yet to meet and yet with His perfect timing, we will cross paths.  We will cross paths and they will forever be crossed.  With the relationships I can establish.  With how I can be prepping in constant prayer and meditation for the trip.  With the agony and suffering I should share for the needy people of Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico.  With the lost and broken, struggling to find the right way because they do not look toward the only way.  With how I can be hollow.  With how I can rejoice.  With excitement and passion and joy and praise to the Maker of thoughts themselves.

With the Father who is over it all.  With the Father who is the Father of all people.

In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us. -Colossians 3:11

 

I am in love with these thoughts.  I am in love with the Originator, Cultivator, Accenuator. 

6 days.  Countdowns are for lovers.

LMB