Follow You

This is a blog I wrote for the e5 Student Ministry while in Costa Rica.

Some words that have kind of been reverberating in my head this week are, "I'll follow You into the homes of the broken. I'll follow You into the world. To meet the needs of the poor and the needy God, i'll follow You into the world." These are lyrics taken from the song "Follow You" by the Christian band Leeland off of their most recent album. What sticks out to me most about this excerpt is not the part about the broken, poor, and needy, but that each phrase begins with the words "I'll follow You". It seems to me that acts of service toward the broken, poor, and needy should be a natural byproduct of following God. You cannot separate the two. 1 John 3:16-19 tells us, "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth."Upon further contemplation of this passage, I have come to understand that our acts of service toward the poor are also one of the greatest ways to show Christ's love. Love in it's purest form requires sacrifice, as we know from what Jesus did for us in making the ultimate sacrifice by dying on the cross.
I personally believe that we can take this a step beyond just material poverty. Physical, spiritual, and emotional poverty can be just as damaging, and can require just as much attention. Not only have the students of West University UMC been serving the broken, poor, and needy this week, but they have been serving each other. I have watched these students pray for each other, offer water to one another on worksites, take dishes and wash them for one another, and so much more. Having just finished my freshman year of college, I have always had the perspective of a student on these international mission trips, and I have found it such an incredible blessing to have the opportunity to now see everything through the eyes of a leader. I truly enjoy watching these students show the love of Christ to others, and also watching them receive it tenfold in ways that they could not have even imagined.
Well, this morning I woke up at 5:00 AM along with 38 others in our group to go whitewater rafting about an hour and a half outside of where we are staying. It seemed to me at the time that the weather may not allow us this great adventure as lightning lit up the sky over and over again, but I resigned to the fact that God was in control, so we got on the bus. By the time we got to the river there wasn't any lightning or thunder, but it was still raining, which surprisingly turned out to be a blessing in disguise. A mission team from Bermuda that had arrived at Charlie's soon after we left was there as well, so we joined forces and drove down to the boats. I'll admit, I was absolutely terrified of what I was about to do, but there was no turning back. We got in our boats and shoved off shore. Now people fell overboard, lost their paddles, and got stuck on rocks, but above everything I was absolutely floored by the creation that surrounded us. I have never seen so much green in my entire life. There were walls of rainforest as far as the eye could see, and waterfalls pouring in from both sides. A couple times during the trip we were able to jump out of the boats and swim, and I would often turn over on my back and just look up. What what I saw was the most incredible exclamation of God's glory I could have ever imagined. I think that kind of beauty is what God must have had in mind even before the creation of the world, and the opportunity to experience that kind of genuine majesty is something that I don't think any of us will ever forget.
We only have one full day left in Costa Rica, and as always on these kinds of trips I'm having mixed emotions about leaving. There's always that fear that the strength I have found in Christ here will slowly disappear as I spend more time away from this environment, but the truth of the matter is that God has changed us through these experiences. He wants to change us, and He died so that we could change, so now it is our job to manifest that change through the way we serve our friends, our families, our community, and even our enemies. Though tomorrow is a free day, I know that our God will continue to work and reveal himself to our team, and we will all return safely home on Tuesday ready to show the world how we have been changed.