Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Love Moves Slow


        I hope every one reading this knows who Audrey Assad is. If not, go look her up! RIGHT NOW! She is a Catholic musician with the voice of an angel and lyrics that can move you to tears. I have been listening a lot lately to her song "Slow" about the slow moving Love of our Lord. This song definitely rings true in my heart, especially over these past few months in mission, but I have recently been so blessed to see them apply to someone else in my life.
     
        One of the ladies of our community(I don't want to use her name incase she looks at this) has become my greatest friend her in Ecuador. She is 25 and beautiful and always radiating with joy.  When we have work day in the community, we always pair up together. She is who I owe the most credit to the increase of my Spanish speaking ability which (Praise the Lord!) is good enough to be able to have deeper conversations with her. The other day we were talking about struggles, sufferings, joys, and things of the heart, prayer, and how God moves in all of those things. You know, typical girl chat. When we were done she said "Que linda podemos conversar en estas cosas ahorrita." (How beautiful it is, that we can now talk about these things.)
     
       I have been privileged to see the Lord slowly moving in her heart as sung in this song. A few years ago, she fell away from the church because a priest refused to baptize her child due to the fact that she is not married in the Church and this obviously upset her substantially. When I met her at the beginning of this year, she had recently separated from her husband and was now living back here, next to us, with her two daughters. After the first three months she started opening up to me more about the sufferings of her heart. Their family is back together now but sometimes It is very obvious that she loves the Lord, but struggles with having  a true relationship with Gof, and having Him heal her heart. Three Sundays ago, I saw her at Mass for the first time. She was starring at me, beaming a smile because she had come and knew I would be so happy and she was so happy! She hadn't been to Mass in 6 years.
       
       Every Wednesday, we have community work day and after lunch have a Bible study/prayer meeting. We sing songs, share scripture, offer petitions and thanksgiving to God. We started back in May and have done it basically every week since. Today is like only the second time she has come. Usually she always finds an excuse to skip out and today when we started my heart hurt because she ran off to clean one of the rooms for some tourists that were arriving soon. In the middle of us giving thanks, however, she came up and joined in! I was immediately filled with Joy! We started sharing about Jesus calling us to be fishers of men. How Jesus is saying for us to "Come to Me!" The Holy Spirit reminded me of something my best friend Abbey Travis shared with me about us being called by the Lord. That Jesus is always straight ahead of us, which arms open, sun shining saying "Come to ME!" as a father calls his children. We start running to him but then get distracted, get distracted by the flowers that we stop to smell. We get distracted by other people behind us calling out our name or those that were running with us and aren't keeping step. We look back, or look down and stumble, but if we would just look forward and keep running is where we will have a greater Joy! She opened up and started sharing a lot as well about it and during petitions her eyes filled with tears.

"Faith is not a fire, as much as it's a glow. 
A quiet lovely burning. A little burning ember in my weary soul" 
     
        Obviously being a missionary it gets a little discouraging sometimes when we desire to have these great awesome ministries that everyone enjoys and comes to and lines up to enter in and pray with us. We want the hearts of people to just LOVE JESUS! To live out their Faith more. We want to make disciples, It is what we are called to do. We want a fire, we want to set the world ablaze! Which isn't a bad thing at all, but we miss that a fire lasts longer when it starts from the embers. It slowly burns, and heats up and then.. BOOM! It spreads! When Jesus did great things in scripture, He would normally tell the people He healed or tell His disciples not to say anything. Why? I used to think, 'Well that's why the Jews didn't believe You Jesus, You didn't tell them You just raised Lazarus! They would have believed! Why didn't You tell them? Did you not want them to know and believe?'
Hahaha, silly me, thinking I just solved that problem. No, He did!
He didn't want a huge blow out excitement that would fizzle out quickly.
     
        When you try to burn wet wood, yeah when you throw some gas on there it blows up and burns a bit, and then burns away. But when you throw a match on some crumbled paper with dry sticks… It slowly but surely burns and burns and burns. However, you have to first gather the sticks in a pile, let them dry and then later you start the fire, right?
     
       That is why it matters when One, just ONE soul comes to Mass that day. The Church was so full the day she came, but I didn't really notice 'til after. Normally it isn't very full. I only noticed that my friend had finally shown up, and I realized in that moment why Jesus cares so much about the lost sheep that returns to Him. It isn't that He doesn't care about all those that normally come to Mass, those that don't stray too far from Him; it is because He is so joyful to see that because He took the time to go out and look, He now has His sheep back. He takes the time, He knocks at our hearts. He moves through suffering. He speaks softly. He waits for us to invite Him in. He heals. He moves deep not wide. He moves slow.

I ask for y'all to please pray for my friend and her walk with Christ.
That she will continue to let Him in, let Him Love her and let Him heal her. 


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