I accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior when I was about 14 or 15. I don’t really remember exactly how old I was, time is a bit funny with me. Regardless, I was led to Jesus by some wonderful friends of mine who showed me Christ’s love by treating me like a brother. Shortly after accepting Christ, my passion for God burned like a gasoline fire. My faith was hard to not notice, but like a gasoline fire, it quickly burnt out because I didn’t provide my faith with what it needed to keep burning and grow. A couple of years before my faith bit the dust so to speak, I was asked by my youth pastor if I was willing to go on a mission trip with the youth group through AIM to Matamoros, Mexico. Mission work didn’t seem like my cup of tea, especially being as young as I was, but for some reason I felt compelled to go and it was an amazing experience and as a result went the next year to Montego Bay, Jamaica. I learned a good many things on those trips, but one thing I didn’t learn is to love others more than myself.
Fast forward to September ’08. At this point I had been trying to live my life without God because there were things in my life I didn’t want to surrender. I wanted to be in control of my self centered life and I would fight tooth and nail to get what I wanted. All this time though I still went through all the usual motions though of going to bible study, going to church, and such but my heart wasn’t in it. Of course trying to live without God, when I had at one time relied upon Him so deeply, didn’t work out and bothered me on a daily basis. My life slowly started to fall apart and as a result, I was growing up to be a man I didn’t want to be.
September is when I got fed up with my life, when I decided things needed to change. My priorities were out of line and I was the complete and total focus of everything I did. I didn’t know what the change that I needed so desperately was though. God quickly showed me one day when I had made a sarcastic remark about moving to Africa, rather than the usual Canada or Mexico. Instead of the customary “Oh and that would solve all your problems!” response, I received a response of people worried about my safety and curious to know why I was leaving and when. I would have never considered myself a person who would ever want to go to Africa but people around me could see me just randomly leaving and packing up to move there.
After mulling over it, I couldn’t deny the fact that there was something behind Africa. So I got on the internet and started searching for humanitarian aid in Africa and stumbled across AIM’s First Year Missionary program. It was the perfect match of what I was looking for and after seeing it, knew that this is where God wanted me to go. This was something huge though and I wanted to carefully consider it and so the following weeks I slowly turned back to God, the only one who could give me the strength and guide me to be the man that I want to be, a man after God’s heart. It’s still slow progress, but I know that this is where God has called me.
Here are some passages that guided my decision.
“Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God… Be very careful, then, how you live– not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.”
– Ephesians 5:1-2, 15-17
“What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith, but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
– James 2:14-17
“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says”
– James 1:22
