As I sit in the bustling lounge of the Singapore Airport, awareness of my surroundings of palm trees, faces and languages of many nationalities, and tantalizing food courts fade into the meanderings and musings of thoughts pulled in a hundred different directions. Hundreds of pictures, memories etched upon my mind and journal entries are all that I have left as tangible reminders of the past eight months. I know that with time, even the memories will become more blurred and distant, the pictures themselves will be archived on my laptop {hopefully} for a future photo book project, and my journal will be tucked away with all its predecessors.
So is that all? Is that what the experiences of the past eight months condense themselves into? Do I go home and return to life as I knew it before living in Asia for an extended period of time?
Or have I allowed God to perform irreversible change in my life? Instead of clinging to my expectations and ideals and resisting the work that He wanted to do in my life, have I truly experienced His Presence by offering myself in brokenness and surrender and being transformed in ways that I could take no credit for?
I am still processing those questions. Honestly, I don't think I will arrive at any clear cut answers to those thoughts but instead trust that the work that God has begun He will bring to completion even in ways I do not see.
In reflection of the past eight months, was it worth it?
On our last day of volunteering at Mae Sot General Hospital, the head nurse in charge of the entire hospital asked through a translator, "why did you quit your nursing job, leave your family, and come all the way to Thailand to live and to study?"
The pointedness of the question almost caught me off guard. When I really stop to think about it, what was at the core of why I left my family, quit a job I loved, endured sweltering heat living in a dorm with more than a dozen other girls, lost sleep over term assignments, ate unusual foods and spent several months interacting with communities of Burmese refugees?
Fumbling for words, I was having a difficult time framing my thoughts into what I figured would be a logical response that would satisfy her curiosity. After all, this is a Buddhist lady, so "Bible schools" and "missionary training" are completely foreign concepts to her.
Before I could even finish my reply, Pii Ophelia responded for me. Pii Ophelia is the nurse manager of the special care nursery where we had volunteered for the past two months, and she had taken Melanie & me under her wing and befriended us even outside of the hospital setting. A devoted Buddhist herself, Pii Ophelia had seemed accepting of our faith but not obviously interested beyond asking a few simple questions.
Ophelia turned away from the hospital head nurse she had been translating for and looked straight into my eyes. In her heavily accented English, she matter-of-factly says, "It's all for God. Yes? All for God."
Without missing a beat, she turns to the other nurse and rattles off a row in Thai, of which I could understand the word "Pra Jao" which translates into "God."
I smiled and excitedly nodded my head in agreement. "Yes, Pii Ophelia, you are exactly right! It is all for God. That is why we are here. To learn more about Him and to show His love to everyone we meet."
In one simple statement, my Buddhist friend had just put into words the real reason why I have spent the last eight months on the other side of the world.
I couldn't have said it better.
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| (L to R) Pii Ophelia, myself, the hospital head nurse, and Melanie |
I want that to be a statement of life purpose, whether it applies to the war-torn refugees of Mae Sot, Thailand, the bar girls and familiar streets of Chiang Mai, or my hometown and neighbors amidst the fields of Mennonite farms and Amish horse and buggies. No matter where I am this coming
year, "It's all for God."
So with bittersweet good-byes and
a tugging at my heart, this chapter of my life draws to a close. A chapter that
God has written with unexpected plots, pages smeared with my tears, lines of
laughter, and paragraphs of blessing. His Goodness and His Faithfulness is
written all over it, and He alone is worthy of receiving glory for what was and
for holding the pen to author what is to come...
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| Dear friends & my mentoring group for 2nd Semester. In 2010, we were students together at IGo, so it was such a gift to be able to all return two years later to do various internships in three different parts of Asia. Thank you, ladies, for showing me what it looks like to live a life that's "all for God"! |
