Let Worldly Minds the World Pursue

04 Oct Let Worldly Minds the World Pursue

In the big city of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, there is a fourteen-year-old girl named Stefany. Stefany gets moved from orphanage to orphanage and really has nowhere to call her home. Many of you have visited a place called Las Casitas, and if you have— you know the conditions where Stefany lives are horrendous. Near the end of my time in Honduras, God changed stefany’s heart in a miraculous way. During the activity of the day (lice treatments), God worked this miracle. Stefany now knows Jesus as her Lord and prayed to God to have a relationship with him.

After we prayed together we walked outside with grins on our faces and looked around as if to find something exciting in a place where she has experienced so much darkness.

It looked the same, still dark. But it did not feel the same. I remember telling her that when someone joins God’s family, Jesus throws a party in Heaven so we should party too! After that we danced for the next hour straight and laughed in the face of the darkness that was all around us. In that moment, God was good and it felt right to say that he had good plans for Stefany’s life.

I am sure that since then, Stefany has had moments where it did not feel like God was good; where darkness seemed bigger than light. So have I. We have all felt that way at some point.

Trust in God.

God is good.

God has plans to prosper, not to harm.

God will protect us.

God goes before us.

In my life over the last six months or so, these promises that we so often say that we cling to seem to have met a reality that left me not trusting that God is good. I did not feel like trusting, I did not see plans of prosperity, I did not feel very protected. I wanted to understand why there is so much suffering. This year my life has been effected by cancer, suicide, violence and death. How could a God who is love let children live unloved? How could an unchanging Holy God really be good when those who love him suffer. In Proverbs 3 it talks about writing the truths of God on your heart so that you will always remember them. But when I thought about what I knew of God and what I saw with my own eyes, sometimes I just couldn’t reconcile it.

Wilderness. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness without doubting or succumbing to temptation. Let’s just say how I handle “wilderness” looks a lot different. Instead of battling through truth I would run from it or get angry. It is so easy to look at the promises God gives us in his word through an earthly lens, or mindset.

Halfway through the summer I received a note from a mom in the Bordos who had recently lost her son. In the letter she wrote, Psalm 23:6, “Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Recently, I read that note again and it hit me hard. SURELY God’s goodness and love would follow her after her son died. SURELY someday she will dwell in a permanent home with God forever. And for that reason, she honestly believes God is good. A verse that I have taken for granted so often is the promise she clings to. This friend of mine wrote this verse three days after her son was killed— that is a heavenly mindset.  The difference between an earthly mindset and her heavenly mindset is that she has a home with a God who is good because he will make beauty in heaven from ashes she collects on earth. She is storing up for herself treasures in heaven.

Finding treasure on this earth is not something God tells us to do, it is actually the opposite.

Thinking ashes on earth reflect that God can’t be good, or can’t keep his promises, is the most dangerous way to think, and it is simply not true. This earth shakes in the presence of our holy God. The mountains move when he says so, and our God is a God who cares for people and at his name every knee will bow. I want to worship that God. He is a God who has a home prepared for Stefany and where Reina will be reunited with her son. He is a God who promises to give us peace while we are here on earth, and who will hold us in the storm. I want to store up for myself treasures through a heavenly mindset. Where destruction and death have no foothold, because God is hope.

This summer I saw moms teach other moms how to sew, children who should not be in school being educated to the highest level, teachers who lovingly support their students every day through all life throws at them, a principal (shout out to Elena Faulkner) who continues to focus on the treasures that are stored up for these children in heaven, a group of young men who actively protect and pursue the advancement of the gospel in a dark place, and a God who is good through all of it.

It looked the same. But it did not feel the same.