We were asked to write what we expect on this mission trip and to be perfectly honest I am not sure what to write. However I am going to give it my best shot and write my expectations on something I cannot even conceive…
I expect to experience a new beauty and refining in the mist of living out
Acts 2 among a group of fellow Jesus lovers. I expect as I walk this I will discover a new spirit of unity and the true cost of drinking the cup as I learn to walk in pure abandonment before my peers and my God. I expect I will be praying continually for the courage and grace to walk it and drink it to its dregs.
I expect the Father to pinpoint certain things in my own heart that I would probably have preferred to have stayed hidden.
I expect the refiners fire but I also expect to sound the depths of my Father’s grace and be continually ravished by His great goodness and love and greeted with unexpected joy.
I expect to see God glorified in me and around me as I watch Him do what He does best.
I expect to be stretched daily and to be quite annoyed at being annoyed with myself on some days. I pray that these days may be few and if they are not that great grace is given to those dear people that have to put up with me.
I expect to be broken and maybe even angry as I see the poverty and injustice and darkness that is going on in the spirit and around me.
I expect that I will daily have to pray for great insight, grace, courage, and sensitivity to discern that which is going on around me, and to trust that the Father is working even when my own emotions and sometimes hard heart are incapable of feeling or seeing it.
I expect I will continually be praying to be soft clay in the hands of the Master Potter so that my heart may not be hardened by what my eyes see.
I expect to learn more about the kingdom of God from those I am sent to minister to than I ever knew existed.
I expect to be humbled as I see their own humbleness and hunger as they drink His Word and have to live and walk the walk in conditions I cannot even imagine.
I expect that I will probably be offended the first time I try to love unconditionally and when given the dirty look discover I don’t even know what unconditionally love means.
I expect that I will have to lean more into God’s great strength and trust that He can love through me despite my own sin and a thousand and one imperfections so that these dear people may find rest.
I expect that I will be terribly homesick for my family and friends and miss all of my family’s wonderful voices, faces, and…just them.
I expect that I will often long for my comfortable bed, quiet room, air conditioned house, and every one of my books.
I expect that when I am back home I will become homesick for all those dear people I am going to spend 8 months of a life-changing experience with.
I expect that I will begin discovering the depths and cost to that which I have said yes to as I let go of each of these comforts, people I dearly love, and every material thing.
I expect that parts of my heart will be offended as I grasp the reality of the cost of Matthew 10. I expect I will be praying for much grace and called to much repentance as these realities shake my heart so that I may be called faithful and “count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8).
I expect to fall even more madly in-love with this God-Man and I pray that I may become rooted and grounded in love so that I can grasp “with all the saints how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge so that I may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:18-19, paraphrased).
I expect I will discover the mystery of being an imitator of God as a child dearly loved by our perfect Father, and discover new depths of my inheritance as a daughter of the King.
Now that I have the hang of this I could probably write a million more, but I won’t and simply state that I expect to be broke and wrecked and pray that I may be able to grasp a new depth in my Father’s love, a new revelation of this righteous Judge, and an impartation of the lovesick Bridegroom King. I expect and pray to be forever changed by those I meet, live with, eat with, and by this God who has promised that His word does not return to Him void but accomplishes that which it set out to complete, and who will finish the good work He has so graciously began in me until the day of His coming (Is. 55:11, Phil. 1:6).
