Trust in the Gaps of Life

I am dumbfounded as I sit here typing at the end of February 2016. Just at this time last year I was prepping my application to hopefully join the IMB and leave overseas for a few years to share the gospel to those unreached, working under another full time missionary. Yet, here I sit typing in America at the time I was supposed to be gone. What has transpired over the past year? How did we reach this point already? What has the Lord been doing?

Last Spring, as I was applying, I received an email postponing the program I was hopeful in participating in due to budget concerns. This coming a few short weeks before I stepped across the stage and completed my college career. Here I am, one of the most if not the most indecisive people to make life decisions and when one is finally made, I am cut short. I mean yes there was the possibility of leaving like two years from that point, but what do I do in the mean time? What do I do in the gap of this? After much counsel from my parents and others around, grad school was decided. I had a degree that required further education so why not pursue it now.

I began the search once again into the great depths of Google to explore possibilities. Education, medical, etc. So many possibilities lay at my feet. Where is the Lord leading I continually ask and seek; wanting some sign of discernment that I wish would come with great clarity. Bam! Right there. This is what you're supposed to do. Why is that so complicated?

But does God's will work this way? I am wondering to myself, reminding me of the past few years where I sat struggling through the will of the Lord and learned a great deal in how we are to honor and glorify Him. That is His will. That we seek first his kingdom and righteousness. That is what scripture teaches us,

"But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you". (Matthew 6:33 ESV)

So around this time, I traveled to Honduras to serve on a medical mission trip. God opened my heart and eyes even more to the mission at hand and what my place might be in regards to this. Pursue medicine in some capacity and be able to viably serve in most areas to bring the gospel. A new plan and future was in place. Here we go...

But as the end of last summer drew near and those around me began living their new, exciting adult lives, I entered this period of lack of trust. I mean why couldn't I have just chosen this from the beginning? I could already be fully finished with school and be leaving or pursuing somewhere else the Lord would call. Why am I plagued with this regret? Most of the fall I wrestled with this question.

But who am I to question why the Lord has me in this place? Who am I to say to Him, "Lord I really don't think you know what you're doing here." Am I the omnipotent one? Am I the one who created the heavens and the earth? The one who placed the birds in the sky and beasts on the earth? No. The answer is no.

"For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." (Psalm 139:13-16 ESV)

We did not create ourselves. And we are nothing without the Savior.

It has taken the past year with numerous rejection emails from jobs and some even graduate programs to realize it is the Lord who is control. Though I believe I am qualified or even over qualified for some of these things, God has another plan in mind. God believes I should have been placed elsewhere. And isn't it a beautiful thing to come to terms with this and trust in the Lord. That He has placed you where you are. What joy we can have in that!

It is at these points, His grace abounds even more. When we let control (which we never had in the first place) be in the Lords hands and trust that He will remain faithful to His chosen and use us in the way He has predetermined. It is all by His grace that I have begun to learn a deeper trust in Him through this gap year of my life and I pray that we all may begin to grow deeper in this. To trust in our Lord and find complete joy in what He has given in life.

"For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living." (Romans 14:7-9 ESV)