It’s amazing to me that you can be in a place for just over 48 hours and feel like you’ve been there for 5 days. I left my house Wednesday afternoon to start this adventure so in reality it has been 5 days, but the travel alone took up 30+ hours. My team and I keep saying we feel like time travelers. Ethiopia follows a different calendar than we do, so it’s only 2009 here! My, oh my, two-thousand-nine. I was a completely different person eight years ago.

I was a girl desperately searching for who I was. I was looking in all the wrong places while convincing myself they were the right ones. I was in a bible study trying to be everything the Bible tells us to be without the relationship with Jesus. I was partying it up living the college life. I was so mean to Steven Lee trying to make him something he wasn’t. I was trying. Trying. So. Hard. To just be. Yes, I prayed. Yes, I thought I was doing the right things, by going down my check-list of what being a “good Christian” looks like. But it wasn’t until I reached Hume Lake in the summer of 2010, to be on staff, that I realized I was looking in all the wrong places.

Jesus craves a relationship with me. That’s it. There is no more and no less. No secret recipe of good works, plus good prayers, equals Heaven. Seeking a life totally dependent on the King of Kings is what I was missing and no check-list of ethical to-dos could fill that void. He uses imperfect people in the most perfect ways to advance his Kingdom.

Sitting here on my bottom bunk in a neighborhood outside of Addis Ababa, with extreme poverty every where I turn, thinking to myself, “Why, me Father? Why have you sent me here. ” The very same thoughts I had my first days working at Hume. Feeling so unworthy, yet so equip to run the race before me. I thought I came here to help and sever others. I had a task at hand. Another to-do. Work to be done. But then I’m sweetly reminded, it’s not about me doing. At all. Then God sweetly whispers in my ear, in this place, half way around the world to say…

“no child, you’re here to meet me and see how vast my love for you is.”