Give Away
Have you ever wondered why God has chosen to make the changes he made in your life? Why He gave you something then took something away? Matt Redman puts it best in his song Blessed Be Your Name, “You give and take away, my heart will choose to say, Lord blessed be your name.” Currently I question these very things.
Last summer I went on my fifth week long mission trip to Baja California, Mexico. I had come to really enjoy these trips. They had become a great opportunity to bless a community of people in need and also helped me grow in great ways with God. On this most recent trip I was presented with on opening to spend the entire summer of 2007 in Mexico doing mission work. It was on opportunity to reach people that were in severe need of humanitarian help, and give it to them with the blessing of my God. It wasn’t ever something that I wanted to do, it was rather something that God pushed me into doing. I really would have rather spent my summer hanging out with friends and enjoying my time off school. But as God usually does, He pounded it into my head that I needed to go, so I was obedient and decided to go.
In the January I started writing letters to friends and family asking them to support me financially with this endeavor that God had given me. God had opened a door for me that I had only dreamed of doing. When I started raising money I knew that there was no way that I was going to raise $2100 by myself. If this trip was going to happen it was going to be because God wanted me to do it. He was going to have to supply the means for this to happen. For the next few months everything fell into place, all the paper work that I thought was going to be a problem became simple, checks started flowing into my mailbox just a few days after I sent out my letters. It was all working out, I was going to Mexico for the summer.
About a month before I was going to go to Mexico my friend Tom and I went out to Smith Rock to do some rock climbing. We had been climbing most of the day when all the sudden on the approach to a climb my right knee buckled and gave way on a small up hill path. I believed that it was just fatigued after a day of climbing. It had hurt for a few weeks and had gotten so bad that I was having trouble walking up stairs, so I decided to go to the doctor to get it checked out. It was now less than a week before I was scheduled to depart for Mexico. When I went to the doctor He told me that I had severely sprained my LCL, which it the ligament that keeps your knee from twisting to much. The doctor basically told me that going to Mexico for the summer and working construction would be an unwise move on my part. He said that I could injure myself more and cause permanent damage to myself.
The very task that God had pushed me into and that I was trying to be obedient too was taken away from me. I had become excited for my summer in Mexico, I was ready to go and spend my time with people that needed help instead of the people that could help themselves. I don’t understand why God would push me into this and them pull me out at the last minute. God had showed me time and time again that He was making this happen, and I was along for the ride because I was not capable of doing it by myself. apparently I really am along for the ride, because I don’t know were I am going. Why is it that I tried to walk through the door that God opened for me, but then he shut it while I stepped onto the thresh hold? I didn’t want to go to start with, it wasn’t my plan, it could have done something else with my time, but NO I decided to listen to God, and He does this to me. I got my hopes up and got exited and then my hopes get crushed into pieces. We are called Jars of Clay, but right now I feel like pieces of that jar that are sitting on the floor.
