I feel like I am finally figuring out what God wants me to do with my life. The exciting thing is that he isn't showing me these things from the standpoint of what I'm supposed to major in or where I'm supposed to be when I graduate, but from the view of how I am supposed to treat people.
One of the things I am learning is that God has not given me a heart for foreign missions at this point. That is one of those things that you think, It would be really cool if God sent me to Africa and I got to do big and dangerous things. But I know that at this point that isn't where God wants me. He's got people he wants to send to Africa and South America and China and everywhere else all over the world, but that isn't what he wants for me. There is nothing to say he won't send me somewhere someday, but for now he is showing me he has me exactly where he wants me, and that is in Nashville, Tennessee at Belmont University.
I am also learning that the reason God wants to use me exactly where I am right now is because he is putting me around the people he wants to reach. He made me good at establishing relationships, and he has put people in my life with whom a relationship was his plan. He is providing the people, and then he is showing me how exactly I'm supposed to love them. People is what it's all about, and I'm supposed to love every single one of them with a genuine love, just like Christ loves me. God is giving me genuine interest in people who need him but don't know it yet, and he is allowing me to do nothing but love those people. I don't have to push, I just have to be available and actually, genuinely love those people.
I feel like as God is showing me the way he's using me right here and now he is showing me that he wants to use me that way for a long time. That's why I'm where I am even though it doesn't make sense for me to be here sometimes. And I don't have a single clue what kind of jobs I will end up with after I get my degree (although my personal preference is Starbucks), but wherever it is I'm going to be there to build relationships with people and just love them. I'm the person who will be there to listen, to talk, to just sit with, to cry with, to celebrate with, or do whatever with, and that's really exciting to me. I obviously don't know all the details, and I don't think I ever will, but I know a little more of what God wants from me, and I can't wait to see where he's taking me.
All of this seems very simple because I know I'm supposed to just love other people. But God has taken me to a deeper level and a better understanding of what this means, and is beginning to show me how it's playing out in my life right now and is going to work in the future. Things are finally starting to come together.
Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.
Colossians 4:5-6
The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.
1 Timothy 1:5
And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.
2 Timothy 2:24-25
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