Plans

"I want you to show love, not offer sacrifices. I want you to know Me more than I want burnt offerings." - Hosea 6:6

I have been back in the States for a number of weeks now. I have been meaning that entire time to write a final blog filled with summaries and closure and lessons learned, and I am finally getting around to doing so.

Most of you know that one of my main prayers going back to Africa was for clarity. I had literally been thinking that I would spend three months in Swazi, come home, finish my last semester of college, and move to Africa in January. I expected to go there and have God say "Faith, this is Africa, this is My plan for your life," but instead what He whispered into my heart steadily for three months caught me off guard and humbled me: "Faith, here I am. I am My plan for your life."

I am not surrendering to a plan or to Africa; I am surrendering to the person of Jesus Christ. What the details of that surrender look like for my life is irrelevant if I am really focused on being surrendered to Him. He will let me know those things in His time. In a way that is not clarity, but this is the clearest confusion has ever been for me.

I have no idea what I am doing in January, but He does.

I have not the faintest clue what I will be doing in a year, and that's how it's supposed to be right now.

I know nothing, but He knows everything, and if I know Him, that is all that should matter.

Since I was a (nerdy) fourteen year old, one of my favorite poets has been Sara Teasdale. I always reveled in the simplicity of her poems. A few years ago I was re-reading some of her work, and I found this poem, written for her husband:

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love - put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

That poem has become my heart's most earnest plea. I still have so far to go to be fully His. The more I surrender, the more I realize I still have left to surrender. I want my life to be so "lost" in the glory of His Kingdom, plunged so deep in His love, that I sincerely am not concerned with what specifically that tapering away of self looks like for my life.