The Crappy, Wonderful, Beautiful Pilgramage

Week 4 has come and gone. I just want to let you know I'm going to be 100% honest and raw in this post. I will not sugar coat or withhold how I am actually doing spiritually and emotionally at this time. It's extremely important to me that I establish that kind of openness in relationships and feel it is fitting to do the same here. I hope that you would see this and that it would resinate with you on a personal level, in all of it's messiness. 

Since before this thing even started Jesus had begun this journey in my heart  teaching me how to "trust" Him. Now growing up a missionary kid, I know all about financial provision, support raising,  and having faith in Him for our needs. So I moved forward without any fear or apprehension as far as with my 

finances.

Within the first few weeks of being here on the island the Lord began doing so many crazy things within my heart, and some of those things I have already begun sharing here on the blog. 

One night last week, I was sitting in the prayer room, seeking His heart for my future and my time here in this season. Just like when Jesus asked Peter three times if he loved him, I heard the Lord ask me three times if I trusted Him. "Anna, do you trust me?"

Like I said before, I had this idea that I fully understood what trusting the Lord looked like but boy is it more than just praying for rent money and rent money coming in. He was asking me to trust Him in every aspect of my life. This included things/areas that I hadn't really let him into like my future. He was asking me to give him my friendships, my relationships, my future, my finances,my life in efforts to follow Him wholeheartedly and (to be completely honest) it really sucked. 

This is no easy thing friends, and I'm not here to say that it is. I was under the impression that I could follow the Lord and have my own "possessions" and agendas apart from Him and still be in alinement with His will. Wrong. In order to be "all in" I had to let go; letting go of things in effort to focus on pursuing the Lord is one of the most difficult yet most rewarding things. 

That leads me to my next point: now that I had let go of pretty much everything important to me, I was left waiting for the Lord to reward me. "Way to go my sweet, obedient, child. I will now reward you with everything you have ever wanted." This is also not always the way it works. We don't follow the Lord because we get things in return, we follow the Lord because He's worth following. Jesus called the disciples by simply saying "come follow me," there wasn't any definitive victory in the horizon when he called them. He simply called them. 

And so, there He was, making me wait patiently. Empty-handed and abandon I like to say. There was peace knowing I was making the right decisions but that still didn't make those decisions easy, or the outcome smooth. And that's what I wanted to convey to you. The Lord has me on this journey of learning how to trust Him with all of it, and sometimes it's insanely difficult and hard. He never said it would be easy but He did promise to be in the midst of it, and I can totally testify to that. It was definitely rocky there for a second but now that the waters have settled I can say there is no better place to be than in the present time in His beautiful presence. 

All of my love

-Awn