longing to serve...

God has been working on my heart since I was eight years old. He has been refining, affirming, challenging, and growing me so that I could get to where I am now. After 11 years of toiling, and questioning, I finally got a glimpse of God’s plan for my life. It is set in stone that for the rest of my life I will be serving people with all that I have. I will be a missionary, no matter where I end up. My heart is at peace knowing that wherever he places me, I will be given the privilege to love people to Christ.

If it was not for staying home in Fresno one more year, I would not have seen that I have a passion for junior high students. Through months of processing and trying out different areas of ministry this last year, God started nagging on my heart about Kenya, Africa. It has been now two years since I spent three weeks serving there; the place I call home away from home. During the trip, my team was blessed to stay at a boarding school for missionary kids called Rift Valley Academy. Before we left to go home, I got to meet several kids my age, attend their youth group, and just hang out.. Strangely, being at Rift Valley Academy, I felt at home. Growing up at a Christian camp my whole life is best described as an American missionary boarding school. The only difference I saw after talking with them was that we lived in different countries. It was the first time I felt understood and that I could relate to others.

This year as I started to seek what God wanted me to do with my life, the idea of going back to Kenya began ringing in my ear. On November 8, 2011, as I was watching a choir performance, my mind stop and a single thought hit me My heart is to go back to Kenya and love and invest on the missionary kids there. That thought was one of the most peaceful and refreshing thoughts that went through my head. My dream is to take the roll of a dorm parent, a person who would love and invest into students who don’t get to see their parents a lot. I know what it is like to sacrifice time with my parents so that they could do ministry and after becoming a leader for junior high students in November, it was affirmed that I would love to spend the rest of my life serving missionary kids.