Being Where God Wants You

I've had many, many good conversations since I wrote my "Might-Have-Beens" post. Thanks for all your comments and calls! I think just verbalizing some of the thoughts that had been floating around in my head for awhile helped. I do feel that God must want us here. One of my problems was that I just haven't been able to see why--we aren't having any great impact on our neighbors, or Bob's family, or whatever, so it seemed to me taht we weren't really "needed" here. Last night I was reading Today's Christian magazine (used to be the Christian Reader). Normally I think of this magazine as a lot of fluff, a very quick read, but this latest issue has some good articles in it. One by Phillip Yancey was called, "It's Hard to Be Like Jesus", and it was about why anyone would choose to follow a God who promises more hardship, not less. Before a trip to Burma, he read several biographies of Adoniram Judson(1788-1850), the American missionary to Burma. What a hard life he had--he was unjustly imprisoned and tortured for 2 years. Right after he was released, his wife and baby daughter both died, and he almost suffered a mental breakdown. There wasn't much interest at all in the Burma people to his message, so he just labored alone for 34 years. That's amazing. Because of his faithfulness, there are now more than 1 million Burmese Christians who can trace their roots to him. But I'm sure that he wondered if he was doing the right thing, and I bet he didn't feel a whole lot of peace all the time. Obviously God used him, and he was faithful even when it didn't make sense. As my brother said, I think we as American Christians just think that if we are doing what God wants, then things should work out smoothly, we should see God working positive things, etc., but that is not always the case. And really it comes down to we have to trust that God is sovereign, and we won't end up where He doesn't want us, and also that He is working even when we don't see it. So now I am feeling a lot better about being here, that God has a plan for us here, and we're not missing some huge part of his plan because we didn't try to go somewhere else for this assignment. Thanks for all the encouragement! : )