Happy official last Monday blog day! What a blessing it has been to share what I have learned about the Lord with y'all over these past few weeks. I have loved nothing more than to be able to write about what the Lord is doing in my heart and just have a time of reflection that I am able to share with all of you. AND, I am so so excited to keep doing this while I’m on the field! 

I think one of the overall messages I have learned in my walk with the Lord is that growth takes time. For a long time, I would get really discouraged when I wouldn’t understand something in the bible or at church, or when I would fall into the same sin patterns as before. I thought when I decided to dedicate my life to God that everything would be magically fixed overnight and I would be this “perfect Christian” who always knew the answers and stayed in routine and never gave way to temptation. However, that's completely not the case, and truly, it never will be. There's no such thing as a “perfect Christian”, so it's something I will never achieve. Now, I don't say this to be discouraging at all, but to show you that our walk with Jesus means we chose to lay down our lives for Him EVERY DAY! Not just one time and then we’re all good. There will always be room to grow and learn more about Jesus; it's an ongoing process. 

So because of this, we can't get on ourselves for failing and messing up in this walk. However, the fact that we'll never be perfect doesn't give us an excuse to act however we want, but rather gives us an opportunity to see the free gift of God's grace. That our sin and failure have already been covered by Jesus on the cross, and when we mess up now, we have the ability to take it to the Lord and lay it at His feet! What a gift that we don't have to be perfect! That is never an expectation that the Lord has put on us, and it isn’t one you should put on yourself either. 

I think that this mindset can also show up a lot when the Lord calls us to something we don't think we are qualified for. I truly have felt this sooo so much about my mission trip. Like, how in the world am I going to leave the country for nine months and share the gospel and serve these people if I have never done something like this before? I start to focus on all the ways I’ll fail and how underprepared I feel, instead of looking at how God has been preparing me for this. I know that people say this all the time, but it's so true that God does not call the qualified, but rather qualifies the called. The Lord has not chosen you for a specific job, or major, or to be a parent, or to serve somewhere because He thinks you’ll do it perfectly. Because the truth is you won't. But God will not throw you in the deep end and leave you there. We grow in the midst of hardship and discomfort, so when we fail at what the Lord has called us to, that doesn’t mean that God has chosen the wrong person or messed up in our calling, but instead has given us the opportunity to grow and seek wisdom from Him!

1 Colossians 1:9-14 says, “For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Have this same heart that Paul and the church in Colossae had. To always seek the knowledge and wisdom of the Lord and be filled with understanding, but to also thank Him for all He has done and the ways He has grown your faith already! You are so loved by the Lord, and He will continue to grow your faith. Remember that growth takes time, and you don’t ever need to expect perfection from yourself because it’s not something the Lord expects from you.