4 Days Left

There are only 4 days of service left in our summer. While we are here until Sunday, we are saving the last few days for retreat and clean up. It's crazy to think how fast the summer has flown, how quickly all of us will be getting back to our 'normal' lives. However, the idea in God bringing us here is not for us to have a nice eight weeks and then head back relatively unchanged. His purpose is always greater, especially when we give Him our time.

I often hear people complain that they don't experience God, or that He doesn't speak to them. Often, God speaks to us in a way that we need to grow in. His language changes our hearts. One thing that has struck me again and again this summer is that God really is in His creation. It's not just a nice saying, it's real. Recognizing Him in others is always a gift of grace. We can't do it on our own. However, many times in order to find Christ in other people we have to seek Him out. By serving the poor and assuming that Christ is in them (because he says so) we then experience Him.

We recently had a difficult fix-up in which the resident was displeased with our work. Nothing we did that day was good enough, in addition we were told that we were lazy and weren't putting real effort into the work. As you can imagine this was not easy for us to listen to. It was clear there was something else going on and the resident was taking it out on us. It is very easy to not really love someone like this. We could have said we were going to practice tough love and left the house. We could have called it unfair and been more forceful in verbally defending ourselves. However, while we were there taking the criticism, many of us had a deeper sense of God wanting to love this resident and not give up. While we were in the house cleaning and I was trying not to get annoyed, I had this sense of Christ on the cross, just taking it. Accepting it. Loving us anyways. This is what He wanted for this resident on this day. This was a day to accept what we were given and love. God in His goodness gave us the grace to do it. I don't know why the resident reacted that way, but I know Christ is in that person. Because He said so.

-Sarah Downes