Change

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a Student Missionary? Then close your eyes and imagine the following…

You’re sitting in a small and somewhat dingy government building to get the work visa you need to stay in the country you arrive in a few weeks ago. The warmth of the room makes you long to get back to Chiang Rai in the north where every room has an open window letting the air cool the stuffy rooms. In the morning you’re supposed to head to Chiang Rai, and you’re definitely ready to see the girls at the shelter again since you had to spend your birthday away from their smiling faces.  But hold on…what’s this about the work visa not being done? Didn’t the information get turned in when it were supposed to or was there lack of communication? So you stay in the hot and sticky city an extra day and have to wait another 24 hours before you can sleep in your “own” bed.

Just a normal day…here’s another:

You’re wringing the last bit of water out of your hair as you walk to find a broom to sweep your room. It feels so good to be clean again after a long day of sweating and traveling, and your apartment needs swept before Sabbath. Before you make it to the booms, a mob of laughing girls come and surround you as they welcome you home. Now off to your room and...Oh wait, change of plans. Stay in the dress you’re currently wearing for vespers in just a few hours, and come supervise/help the girls move a pile of dirt at a building project of the church’s with buckets and shovels. You’ll sweat a whole lot and need to take another shower before supper but at least there’s productive work, right?

It doesn’t stop there, though.

You’ve been told before you arrived that you’ll be teaching English to the girls but in addition to that you’re needed to teach music, acting, and just about anything else. You’re also needed to add more of a spiritual presence in the shelter, someone tells you but that doesn’t make a ton of sense just yet. Then you arrive and learn that the teaching of English is the most important thing to do, and if that’s all you get to, that’d be fine in the eyes of the staff. The girls are extremely busy with school, and free time to add in any other extracurricular activity seems impossible. As for God, isn’t church and Sabbath activities enough? You don’t need to add anything because the girls just “don’t have time.”

In reading this post you can probably guess where I’m going…Missionary life is always subject to change so be prepared for the unexpected…but actually…no. That’s not what has been on my heart. You see, being flexible with plans can be an easy thing in some regard. We may become irritated but you can simply learn to live life with an attitude of going with whatever happens. Even changes in dreams can be a thing to accept if you tell yourself enough that this must be God’s plan for you.

But what about when you’re the one changing? Either you seem to be changing too fast or you don’t seem to be changing at all. With each of the other “versions” of change, everything is external even if it may affect us internally. We see it happening and can simply adjust. But internal change is different. Many times we let a thought grow or let a word someone says to us impact us, and pretty soon we find we think differently than we did before. We leave frustrations in our heads, telling ourselves it doesn’t really matter, but the next time something happens to bring the frustration up, instead of remaining silent our thoughts bare their heads in ugly words.

On the flip side, we tell ourselves we just need to be a certain way and everything will be better but for once the words we tell ourselves just don’t seem to affect our hearts and behavior. We might even try adjusting our behavior, thinking surly this will change us, but instead when we look at ourselves we see that nothing seems to have really changed in our hearts and minds. Or what about the times when you know so deeply in your mind that something is one way and yet no matter how much head knowledge you have, your heart seems to always tell you contrary. For good or bad, it seems we change when we don’t wish to change and can’t change when we wish we could. Yet even deeper than each of these things is changing the way we look at ourselves or working against our insecurities. We wonder if these struggles will ever become something we’ll just know as the pain of an old memory and not a scab that reopens when it is touched just right.

This morning as I talked with my boyfriend, I mentioned some of my current frustrations with change. He posed a question to me that made me think and still makes me think even now. “If nothing does change,” he asked, “would you be okay with that?” What if my goals for being here in Thailand aren’t fulfilled to my satisfaction because my internal struggle with perfection doesn’t see the current situation as a success? What if the place where I want to get to in my relationship with God isn’t met within this year? What if I can’t stay positive in every situation and what if the things I struggle with at the beginning of the year happen to be the same struggles at the end? What if I still doubt myself as much as I do right now? What if my heart and my head still don’t align as they should?

The truth is, I don’t know if I would be okay with it…In my mind change needs to happen, and it needs to happen now! I don’t think I’m the only one who has ever thought that way. Over the past week and a half, I’ve read through more Psalms in that amount of time than ever before, going from the first to seventy-eighth, which I am currently reading and journaling through. A common theme that David and the other psalmists keep repeating is a need for change. David wants a new and clean heart in Psalm fifty-one but three psalms later he needs saving from strangers seeking to kill him. In the next psalm though, he is asking for deliverance from a friend that has turned into an enemy. Multiple times he asks God to change the words of his mouths and the thoughts of his heart. Even his sins, he feels, is impossible to change in Psalm thirty-eight even though that is exactly what he’s calling out for God to do. It makes you wonder if there was any change in David’s life since his complaints and requests to God don’t seem to change much in the first eighty chapters?

Considering that he keeps crying out to God, one has to assume there’s some sort of change 

happening or else why would he keep seeking God? Psalm 57:7 says “My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast.” In journaling I wrote besides this verse that David isn’t about to change who he puts his trust in even when things change as he wishes they would not or nothing changes when that’s all he wants. Even if it doesn’t seem like it, change is happening but in a “time zone” different from his own. He keeps his focus where it needs to be and trusts that God will do the rest. After all, what lasting change can David do that he knows will actually work out in the end? Within the Psalms David does mention time and time again when he has been changed or his situation was changed by God. It happens, even if it’s only in later years that David can look back and see the change that has happened in his life.

I don’t know why things in my life do not always change as I wish or why struggles remain the same. I don’t have answers for you and your own questions about change. All I know is to encourage you to keep calling out to Him. Even when you wonder why your requests seem to be on repeat, keep looking for change but trust Him in the moment when that seems impossible. Maybe the change we’ve been looking for isn’t quite what we think it should look like and yet it’s still there if we look hard enough. Let everything around you twist, turn, and change but let one thing remain the same.

Remain steadfast, my friends, and I’ll do my best to do the same.