till I try, I'll never know

I'm thinking about setting some goals for myself. Mainly, I want to set one major goal for my life and start running towards it with everything in me.

See, one of Kacy's recent posts had a quote from Crazy Love about how it's really just laziness that makes us wait around to discover God's will for our lives. I'm realizing this is shockingly true of me. I'm beginning to think it's not so much that God's will for me is a secret passage through a jungle which I have to find, taking each step with fear and trembling lest I leave the invisible trail. Rather, He's handed me a compas and a survival guide, and now He expects me to find a way through the jungle by my own inginuity, although He knows exactly how I can best accomplish this task and He will help me every step of the way.

This being the case, I don't think I want to waste any more time waiting for a road map. I think it's far more Biblical to just choose a direction and start walking in it. Instead of praying for a magical yellow brick road to appear in front of me, I should be praying for wisdom, for a clear head, and for courage and energy to fight against the obsticals. Of course God does have a plan for my life, but I'm only going to find it through hard work. As Beth mentioned at a Bible Study on Friday, nothing good comes without hard work- but hard work can accomplish almost anything. If circumstances are absolutely against me, I'll try another path and run down that one as hard as I can until I can't run any furthur there either.

Thinking about all these things, today I picked up a book by Elisabeth Elliot that had been on my shelf for forever called God's Guidence. And listen to this: "There were occasions when Paul attempted to do things he wanted to do but was 'prevented by the Holy Spirit.' He does not mention special guidence in the decision to do the thing- it was what he wanted to do, so he decided to do it- but he certainly had special guidence to stop, and it came in time, before he strayed off the path of righteousness. It is, we may properly say, natural to trust God to do this for us once we have made up our minds to follow, and we need not be forever halting and backing up, paralyzed by fear of our own desires."

There you have it. I'm not the only one thinking this way.

So... I would like to tentatively set the goal for myself of being in a foreign country helping with some mission or another by this time next year. This seems like the right goal for me now mostly because it's the only thing I really want to do. I could finish school or move out or get a really good job, but I have neither the resources nor the ambition for any of these things at the moment. So mission trip it is.

I think it will take about a year, since I have to pay off my debts, buy a car, and raise the money for the trip. Not to mention actually finding a mission group and getting hooked up with them, doing whatever training is required, and maybe even learning a little about the language of wherever I end up going. Also, I'd like to pray about this ever single day. That's a lot of work. But I'm excited to get down to it, and really excited to see where I'm at on April 26, 2011!