Living the Dream...

The past two weeks have been a little rough.  We are gearing up for jungle camp (more on that later), homework has been increasing, Grammar is WAAAAY harder than I thought (I'm not as smart as I thought I was), this spring semester is a long one and our class is tired, and our family hasn't really been hearing from people and we're feeling forgotten...so, to make a long story short, this is a perfect recipe for discouragement, doubt, and feelings of failure.

As I was having ANOTHER meltdown over Grammar, Bill was holding me and said, "Well, we're living the dream, aren't we?"  I kind of looked up and I thought "I guess so."

What exactly is the dream of being a missionary anyway?  What did I think it meant?  Being with people of another skin colour, surrounding me, literally DYING to know who the Saviour is?  Being out in the "bush", giving medicine to people who would LOVE to NOT have to die with malaria, or measles, or the myriad of other diseases we can easily cure with anti-biotics?

Here is the reality of a missionary's dream.  There will always be more to do than there are hours in the day.  There will always be something that we can't seem to figure out, and feel lost in it.  There will always be projects/terms/fill-in-the-blank that seem to go on forever with no break, and there will always be times when you not only FEEL forgotten, you actually are.  What do we do with the dream then?  What then?

I really don't have an answer to that.  I do believe that God is the one who gave me the "dream" of being a missionary.  What I'm finding out though, is that He also gets to design what that will look like.   I don't get to design the dream for myself.  I don't get to decide the things I'm to learn.

What I DO know, is that being a missionary is MORE about God teaching me about Himself, and way LESS about me teaching others about God.  Sharing Christ in a cross-cultural context will come, in time.  But right now,  I'm learning things about God that I might not have learned had we not come into the training.  And yes, that IS 'LIVING THE DREAM.'