Overall Recap| PH 2019
For those of you who know me well, this is the scripture I cling to during scary times and found myself revering it throughout this trip. Matthew 14:25-33 where God calls Peter out to walk on the water and in his complete focus on God, he does the impossible of walking out onto the water. But as soon as he takes his focus off God, he notices the waves and winds and gets scared and starts to sink.
For me, there was a main overarching theme to our trip that stuck out to me that directly related to the level of guidance I sought out from God during our Trip and how that correlated to how alive God was in our trip. In other words, there was a correlation between the level of epic-ness that correlated to who I let lead.
Because there was an extremely noticeable difference between:
When I was fully leaning on God to get through each day to
When I tried leading on my own without turning to God
When I tried to let the tour guide lead (bc I was honestly tapped out of energy to lead) which didn’t work out great.
But when I think back on our trip, I constantly have to pull my focus back to the beginning of the trip and remember how every morning (until literally the last day of clinic) I saw how God provided the time I never thought I would ever get to have to finish things needed for each day, which allowed God the glory as it all came together not because of all the planning I did, but because God provides even if its placing each step under each foot as I move forward..
God provided a patient that worked with customs to help my mom get back the glucometers
God provided me a few hours to figure out what the 2nd day of enrollment would look like, provided natural leaders to take lead of teach glucometers and nutrition, provided JUST the right amount of time needed to do a training on the drive to the next enrollment location
I can go on and on with examples..
Then came the last day of clinic, which was really hard for me because I was burnt out and quite honestly fed up with the amount of energy wasted on politics. The energy I literally needed to focus on providing the best care we could to the patients we were serving, but instead was wasted on local volunteers too concerned about getting their free shirt, selfies and personal handouts from the pharmacy/vision station.
For me, this is where I let the “waves and winds distract me” and my focus got derailed off God.
I was so overwhelmed and fed up to the point I physically had to leave the medical mission to process everything and it reminded me of a similar instance where I was so broken with the current way we were doing things within BTC that it brought me to tears thinking that there has got to be a better way of doing things.
It was a time where I realized our current medical mission model had a blind spot towards patients with chronic disease states and tiny bags of medications wasn’t going to cut it. Something more had to be done and from that sadness came the Continuation of Care Program.
So the team may have felt it the last few days that my demeanor changed on that last day of clinic and it was because of many factors, but the biggest factor of everything being too nonstop to really fully sit in and process this tug that I sensed; this opportunity waiting to be fleshed out.
Yes there is comfort in doing what is safe and familiar just for the sake of saving face. But for those of you who know me well, discomfort and failing in front of an audience doesn’t stop me for continually finding a way to better serve out patients
And bless Danna and Dallas’ heart because they’ve been on two of the trips that were full of me exploring new ways of doing things 1. The very first Myanmar Trip and 2. This trip with introducing the Continuation of Care Program.
It is very common for people to describe Be the Change as “fresh and new”. As long as God keeps tugging at my heart that there are better ways to serve our international communities, we will literally always “Be the Change” within our own organization. That may make some people uncomfortable, or some to learn to be flexible, or to learn how to let God lead them. Either way, I have NO DOUBT that the potential is there for this tug to open to new ways of approaching international medical missions and I am going to continue to push through the discomfort and unknowns until God reveals what that Change will look like!