I'm always telling God what I want, when I want it and how I want it delivered. And strangely...He doesn't always indulge me! In fact He has all these ideas about how things should be done HIS way. At thirty years old I'm finally beginning to understand why.
As a child my only life goal was to find where all the unicorns were hiding and free them. Seriously. I had some aspirations! I was sure that they had to be real and that I was the one to bring them back from whatever bondage they were in.
Obviously that didn't pan out so I switched my focus to bums. Growing up in the Portland Metropolitan area I saw my fair share of homeless people. I was fascinated by them. One of my favorite pastimes was to look for good sleeping places under bridges. By the time I was in Jr. High I decided I was going to be a writer and live with the bums. I would then write a groundbreaking memoire about their struggles. Unfortunately fashion and creature comforts were too hard to give up ( I mean who could survive without weekly trips to Nordstroms?) so I forgot all about my homeless friends.
In high school I had no real direction or aspirations so I focused on learning the French language. For some reason I decided that being an interpreter for the United Nations was just right for me. I struggled through five years of French classes in high school and college. I was all set to transfer to Linfield University when I got engaged and gave up the idea of living abroad and speaking a romantic language everyday.
All of these plans seemed so great and important to me at the time. I was just SURE that I was on the right path. However after much reflection I can see that I never really included God in any of those plans. The motivation was to do something to please and satisfy myself without much thought given to my Creator. In recent years I have appreciated how He didn't give me my hearts desire at any given moment. I mean really, what in the world would I do with a herd of unicorns?
What I take from all these silly dreams is this. I am designed by God to long for fulfillment through Him. Going into missions is the culmination of all of my early plans. In searching for unicorns I was longing for something magical in my everyday life. Now I see that the magic is Christ and how He changes people. While feeling sympathy for the homeless I was wanting to help people with real needs. Obviously there are real needs in the people of Uganda. Struggling with a language for years that I never did anything with seemed pointless. However, it gave me a love for languages and makes me excited to learn one of the 47 dialects spoken in Uganda.
Maybe all this is a bit of a stretch. But I know God transforms everything, even our selfish desires, for His glory and our good. I am no longer projecting what I think will happen in the coming years but looking forward with great expectations of God.
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