"When the Father Says I Love You"

It was Labor Day weekend and I was at the Northwoods in Michigan having an absolute blast!!

Have you ever gone somewhere far away from city lights and noise and city scum, and just bask in the awesomeness of the sky, stars, etc. The Northwoods is God’s country right there. I think the garden of Eden must have been there.

My last night in Northwoods, I dragged my mattress outside on the balcony and brought out my blankets and pillows. It was a quiet, clear night as I lay on my back looking up at the stars. The moonlight reflected on the water. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I looked up at the myriad of stars. Wow had I forgotten there were so many up there! I could even see the edge of the Milky Way galaxy!!

Earlier that evening, a group of us had run outside to see the Northern lights. I had not gotten to see the shooting start that everyone was exclaiming at so that night as I lay there alone I said to God “Show me a shooting star.” I looked up at the sky for a few minutes and in the next split second, a shooting star flew by. Wow that was beautiful! “Let me see another one, one more God…” I said. A few more minutes and there it went—another shooting star! This was fun. So personal. It was magical. As if scripted for my heart. God knows what takes your breath away, what makes your heart beat faster.

Then in the quiet of my spirit I felt God say, “Cristina remember what you asked me for when you were 15?” I smiled. “Yeah I remember.” I was out in the mountains doing mission work with my family. At night I was watching the stars and I asked Him for two things. I said ‘God do you see all those stars in the sky? That’s how many people I want to impact for You. That’s how many people I want to take with me to Heaven when I go. But one more thing I ask, give me the boldness of a lion so that I can open my mouth and You can use me.’”

A few months later, right after my birthday, I was sitting in my room looking for another book in the Bible to start reading, when the thought came: Deuteronomy. I thought, well heck if I’m going to do Old Testament, I might as well start from the beginning. But again came the thought: Deuteronomy. So I started from chapter one. I hadn’t gotten far into Chapter One when verse 10 popped out at me: “The Lord your God hath multiplied you, and, behold, ye are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude.” Stars? “the stars of heaven for a multitude…” But it gets better: v.11 “(The Lord God of your fathers make you a thousand times so more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you!”) Wow. That’s one massive promise.

I had to re-read those two verses quite a few times before I fully grasped their meaning. I don’t think I’ve fully gotten it yet. But that will be my verse for the year, and my whole life. Until the Kingdom of God to begins to break through a time-space world, and the darkness can be broken over the eyes of men. God wants to put us in strategic places where we can influence the nations. And what a special privilege that God would call us to take His glory to the world.

Finding Absolute Joy in Times of Despair

Wow so I come back from this mountaintop experience with God and BOOM it’s like all hell fire unleashes! At first I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason, then God showed me that the eyes of my heart were delighting in something (someone!) else and He didn’t have 100% of my heart. He wants 100% of your heart, not 99%! Have you ever thought of that? Because He is a jealous God and all competing affections must go, and painful as it may be, in his perfect wisdom and mercy He will do whatever it takes to remove them.

Elizabeth Elliot once said, “Turn your loneliness into solitude and your solitude into prayer.” Ok! I’m a pretty happy person but when I do get hit with discouragement or loneliness (yes I am human :) I think of what she said and take it as a special call from God that He wants to spend extra time with me. Yesterday and today I have spent every moment I possibly can saturating myself in the scriptures and prayer like my life depends on it. Because it does. Right now it really does.

Life was so much simpler when I was a child. I long for the days when my greatest decisions were which doll I would play with next or how I would manage to get out of doing Math for the morning. The days when my greatest worry was that the ice cream truck would not come by and my greatest fears that my pet hamster would die like all the others did, or my hair would not curl right even though I slept in the sponge rollers all night!

Yesterday morning and said, “God I’m going to need some extra encouragement from You today, will you love me today in a special way?”

I opened Psalm 4 and read, “Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness: thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress…But know that the LORD hath set apart him that is godly for himself: the LORD will hear when I call unto him... put your trust in the LORD. There be many that say, Who will show us any good? LORD, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us. Thou hast put gladness in my heart…”

My mom brought in a stack of letters for me in the mail we picked up at the border. The first letter I opened was from a girl I had met and corresponded with years ago. The date of the letter was March 5, 2005. 2005! I know sending mail to the missionaries can take a while, but 3 years?! Well I opened it and read the first few lines and it might has well have been God’s own handwriting in His words to me! As if every single line was scripted specially for my heart. And she even said, “I don’t know if you have graduated from college yet, but here are words of blessing for your life…” And on it read, “I will be your God…abundantly bless you…love you freely…strengthen you…ransom you…be with you…I will never leave you or forsake you.” That’s earth shattering truth for me! Get this, if I had received that letter in 2005 when it was written and sent, the words might not mean what they do now, I had not even graduated yet! But today I just graduated. Today I needed that. Today.

“I am love by the King, and it makes my heart want to sing.”

I want to live and die for something greater.

A few days ago, I was talking to a friend of mine in another part of the United States and I began to realize the places I had gone and things I had done, people I had seen since the last time I saw him. He sells pizza. That’s what he was doing last time we talked. That’s all he’s planning on doing for now. (Until what happens?)

Since the last time I saw him, he said to me, “I have an apartment, a car, money, everything I need to live a comfortable life.” Then he said something I will never forget, he said, “I am living the American dream and I hate it.”

Today he continues to sell pizza. Not that that is not a glorious job or anything (I like pizza, someone has to sell it!), but he would be the first to tell you “that’s not what I was made for.” That’s not what God had in mind when He made him. That’s not the grandiose plan and purpose for which God created him.

This is not what he dreamed of doing all his life. It reminds me of a song that says, “This ain’t my American dream. I want to live and die for bigger things.”

If God has a greater plan for me than what I am doing now, then I want to hold fast to that. If there are people on the other side of the world or next door who will live in darkness unless I follow Christ in the path he treads for me and tell them about Him, then I will give the rest of my life to do that.

People used to ask me, “Cristina, what do you think you will do when you grow up? Will you be a missionary like your parents?” I used to say, “Well if I grow up and marry, I will do whatever my husband does.”

Now that I am “grown up” (I guess!) and after living in the USA for almost 2 years, I’ve come to the realization that my heart is with people of other countries. I could never live here for the rest of my life and be happy. I mean, how do you re-enter normal space after dancing with orphans and giving bags of rice to widows? How do you walk back into a Wal-Mart after seeing street kids with bloated stomachs begging for food? How can you ever go through the grocery store without picturing those Rwandese women carrying baskets of fruit or huge stalks of bananas on their heads? After my first trip overseas, I was 15 and went to England for a youth conference. I think it was that day that ruined me forever. Since then I have been to Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, England, China, and Russia.

I remember standing in front of my clothes closet and thinking that I didn’t need half as many clothes as I had. I remember walking into a store and being overwhelmed with the abundance of items available compared to what you can purchase in Guatemala. The other part that’s difficult is trying to express to people back home what you’ve been through and how you’ve changed as a result of what you’ve seen. As I wax eloquent, telling stories about meeting persecuted widows, carrying orphaned babies who have hardly had contact with humans, or about seeing God move in people’s lives in such a real way, many of my friends can sometimes fail to grasp what I want to say. For them, life went on as normal here. For me, life was anything BUT normal. May God deliver us from comfort and ease, and grant us to continue to walk alongside the great men and women whom we have met there.

“Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves. When our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little. When we arrive safely because we have sailed too close to the shore. Disturb us, Lord.” - Francis Drake