Thursday, March 13, 2008

Walking in the Wilderness

I am in Lima right now, just got out of the jungle near Pucallpa where I helped with the training that is going on now. I am still waiting on my partners to get their money so please keep praying for them. One of the trainees, Jeffrey Johnson, has since joined our team. He has to have surgery before he can start the work but we are excited about him coming to the team.

These past few months have been good and challenging but also hard in so many ways. The LORD has been working through me in many areas of my life and I wanted to share how. I will try to make this a little more brief as I have received complaints from my boss that they are too long. My bad.

I came here almost a year ago now, all with the intentions, the dreams, the expectations that the Father was going to use me and I would see Him move through a people group and they would come to know Him and His Glory. There have been many things that have delayed my actually working with my people group from arriving in the middle of a training having to wait three months to go through my own training, to not having partners and fulfilling obligations of the team. I have met a lot of frustration having the Quechua in my sights but not yet arriving. I have had in the back of my mind yet surfacing too often the idea that God will just not use me here, that I won’t see the work of His hand.

Reading in Deuteronomy the other day I came upon the passage in chapter eight that says, “And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep is commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.”

The Israelites were given the promise over four hundred years before, and though they were able to leave Egypt having the Promise Land in sight, they still had to walk for forty years until they were ready to receive the promise. It was hard to think that I could come down here for the desire for people to know Him, to be used in this way and after all that was done was me being changed and nothing more. But as I have walked these “forty years in the wilderness” I realized how much I needed that change and I have come to know that if He is going to use me He will use me in His way. My heart is stubborn and foolish, and this process has been necessary and still is to rid me of the things that hinder my usefulness to the Kingdom.

My prayer is that I will start living on the Word, that when tested the Father will be pleased to know what is in my heart, and that not by my acts or righteousness but by the mercy and grace of the LORD I will see this promised land.

“For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land…And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you.”