Passion

Let me just be very frank for a second.
The life I've chosen to live can sometimes suck. Majorly.
Every time I get on Facebook or get a letter in the mail, I get to hear about how awesome University is and I get to read about all the experiences I've wanted since I was 12.
I never see my family. When they drop me off at the airport each time I fly back to South Africa, I stare at them through the other side of the terminal window for a few moments, sizing them up and praying that I can remember their faces as clearly as if they were always behind some distance transcending window. If I'm being honest, I forget. I forget the slate grey color of my fathers beard or the way my sister burrows her eyebrows and sticks out her tongue when she concentrates. I start to replace the details with only fractions of them, as if changing from HD TV to regular. It just gets a little fuzzy.
I get lonely. Living on the mountain allows me to live in tremendous beauty at all times, but it sometimes feels as though I'm locked on an island because there are limits to when and how often you can come and leave the mountain. They are not limits set by JAM, but ones I inflict on myself. I could always walk down the mountain,  but even then, who would I see? I know very few people in Cape Town and even fewer are within walking distance.
And then there's the simple fact of never really knowing where you're going. In university, you get chances to take classes and test where it is you want your life to be heading. If you don't like your major, scrap it and pick another. There are endless possibilities. But at least in this phase of my life, I have no clue where I'm going or what I'm doing. Will I just be in ministry for forever or not?
And lastly, there's an aspect of alone-ness that comes with simply doing something no one else is doing. It gets really frustrating when no one your age or really no one from your world understands what it is to live in another world. Coming home for this past 6 weeks has been such a blessing don't get me wrong, but I had this impossible expectation for the people I love to understand what it is to be in the situation I'm in. To know all the questions to ask and feel all the things that I have felt. But that is not even possible. You cannot expect a bird to understand what it is to swim.
So all these things and more I have been wresting with for several weeks now. I've been trying to decide what the next step for me is after JAM. I've been losing my passion and direction for what we do in JAM and even in missions in general. I thought I was starting to lose interest in missions entirely.
And then Passion happened.
Passion is a HUGE christian conference for people ages 18-25. I went this year with a vanful of some really good friends of mine. The speakers were all great and enlightening and the worship was very powerful. But the one thing that touched me the most was a prayer time at the very end of the conference.
It was hardly a main event of the conference but a few hours before it ended on Saturday night, Louie Giglio, the founder and main speaker, first asked everyone to stand in the stadium who wanted to accept Jesus into their hearts right now. The amount of people that stood was actually uncomfortably low, but no matter, Jesus is doing what He is doing and I rejoice in the handful that did.
But then, Louie asked everyone in the stadium to stand up if they felt a call to the nations, aka, overseas missions. I have been praying for a few weeks now for the nations. It has been burned in my heart a brokenness for all the people in the world who do not know Jesus, especially the ones who do not even have the opportunity to because of political or religious oppression. Even within South Africa, a country who can freely have the Word and love Jesus without having to worry about jail or death, my heart still breaks for that country. Whenever our JAM van pulls up in a community for kids ministry or something, they come RUNNING to it. I don't know the individual stories of each kid, but when we come, we give them love, we show them the love of Jesus, and I just don't know that they get to experience that very many other places. Jesus gives them a hope they cannot know from what their world teaches them. Most of our kids and adolescents are growing up in a world of 25% unemployment. That's one out of every four people without a job. Very few of them will leave the town they grew up in and even fewer will leave the country. Most of them will grow up to be a part of a gang, or perhaps they'll die of aids very young.
My heart breaks for the nations. And I pray even though the workload is great and the laborers few, that God would send our generation as the hands and feet for Him. Every person, I believe has those couple of things they pray for as vigorously as they pray for self-centered things. If I think about it, I spend an awful lot of time praying for things in my life, internal struggles, or even friends, but praying for the nations is one of those things God has given me a broken heart for and I pray just as strongly for that as I do for myself.
Anyway, during Passion, Louie asked everyone in the stadium to stand up if they felt a call to the nations. Hundreds of students stood. Hundreds of 18-25 year olds have already been marked as ambassadors to the nations and I just started crying in my seat. I mean really crying.
I have seen very few things as beautiful as that. And all at once I got an overwhelming conviction that loving the nations is and always will be my calling. I have never been more passionate about the world and about missions. And I am overjoyed to be heading back to my brothers and sisters in South Africa tomorrow.
It's a sad and awesome thing to know that your home is changing and your world is changing.
So many times during the previous 5 months, all I wanted was to go home. And now, I've been home for 6 weeks and for the past 5 weeks, again, all I wanted was to go home. Only, I finally have realized, I'm going home tomorrow.