Life away from home is much different than I ever expected, and by “different” I mean completely abstract from every foundation to which I once clung. The beauty of it all is that in that abstract separation of knowledge and the unknown stands Christ, sovereign and true, before me with open arms, waiting for me to rest in Him. Since leaving my home and stepping out in faith to serve overseas, God has so graciously shown me what it means to “wait upon the Lord”—a once equally abstract concept that I rarely understood and never applied.
As a missionary teacher, I have found my heart breaking for every student that walks through my door. Each child of God that steps into my classroom tears at the fabric of my compassion and compels me to put aside my own struggles for the sake of showing them the love of Christ, for which they so desperately thirst. When I arrived two months ago, I was crying out to the Lord for justice, asking that He bring righteousness to their lives by erasing their problems. My heart was empathetically churning for their sorrows. What I did not yet understand was that our God is a God who renews, not a God who disables. In Isaiah chapter 40, God promises to give strength to the weary, and that is a promise that He has fulfilled tenfold since my arrival.
My students often come to me with their broken hearts looking for an “easy way out”; and now that I have been in a foreign land, away from every luxury I once knew, forced to depend only on God’s good grace to give me life, I can finally tell them with assurance that though trials will painfully scour their heart, if we let the Lord renew us in strength, we will live to see the greatest blessings He has to offer. I did not realize until moving to Bolivia just how much I was selling myself short by not allowing the Lord to bless me with His mercies. Since being here, I have witnessed countless miracles that overjoy my heart and I have been renewed afresh daily, able to survive each day with excess joy and passion for the next. And because my God is the God He says He is—I will never grow weary.