This is it. The trip was over 4 weeks ago, and now I’m sitting here in my living room writing the “final blog” for our mission to Czechia. I’ve been asking myself: “How do I sum up the whole trip in a single blog?”, and it’s definitely quite the challenge. I think the simplest way I can share this is by telling you about one of the biggest lessons I learned during the trip.
Going into the trip, I fully expected it to be hard, but I never truly grasped how difficult it would actually be. Don’t get me wrong, it was a fantastic experience, and I would do it again in a heartbeat, but on the trip I found myself in situation after situation where I was completely unable to serve effectively on my own.
The key phrase there is: on my own.
God used the trip to put me in a place of complete dependence on Him in a way that I’d never seen before, and I realized that serving Him is never something that I should be doing on autopilot. It’s easy for me to fall into familiar patterns of conversation when I’m talking to others about Jesus, but in Czechia, these simply didn’t work. I realized that in every conversation I needed to be constantly praying for guidance on what words to say, and once I began to rely solely on Christ for my words, my conversations began to bear fruit!
This doesn’t just apply when we are in a foreign country. We need to be humble enough to be willing to admit that we need God’s help and wisdom every moment of every day. I’d like to leave you with this verse:
And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in distresses, in persecutions, in difficulties, in behalf of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
1 Corinthians 12:9-10 (NASB)