Intimate knowledge of yourself isn’t something that comes easily, and in fact there is a level of giving yourselves to others that needs to take place in order for other people to help you know who you are. When I was in the Philippines one of my teammates pointed out a certain tick that I did anytime I was speaking from a place of vulnerability, but before that moment I had no idea that I fidgeted in that way. Community has been essential to understanding myself, beyond superficial idiosyncrasies and moving into truth about my calling as an individual. My past year has yielded an incredible harvest of knowledge about myself, but in life there is much more than knowledge.
Some have proliferated that knowledge is power, but action is what breaths life into knowledge and makes it powerful. Still, Perhaps you’re with me, in that you sometimes know exactly what needs to be done, but find your ability to follow through on what needs to be done completely dismal. Knowing all the steps to an Alcoholics Anonymous recovery will do no good without action, and this is the danger that I feel Americans, myself included, fall into perpetually. Receiving extraneous amounts of knowledge on an assortment of topics, but never allowing that knowledge time to grow into experience.
Intent on real change, I moved down to Georgia to work with the Center for Global Action (CGA), a discipleship program to produce real change in individuals who completed a mission trip with Adventures In Missions. Strangely enough, when moving to Georgia there was not a clear definition of what we were going to actually be doing, and that was because “Action” as exhibited in the name, was a fundamental part of what they wanted to instill into their apprentices. Unlike a university setting, this “Action” aspect of the program put responsibility on us apprentices to step out in faith into all realms of our influence with what we were/are continually learning.
As soon as we arrived, the highest level of leadership declared that we were not simply there to receive something from them, but to in turn pour out, into AIM, into our fellow apprentices, into our neighborhoods, into our workplaces, and into all levels of community. Action like that can be nerve racking to think about mentally, but in my mind I have a vision of what Jesus says about living water.
Living water is a type of water that is not stagnant, a type of water that is always fresh, a type of water that He parallels with himself and tells us that will never run dry, and for much of my life I believed that I didn’t need to go anywhere to be all that I needed to be, that God would use me where I was, and that I could work on myself alone. However, I’m finding that more often than not, I need to move, I need to run myself through a filter to get some imperfections out so that I can be everything that I’ve desired or hoped I would be.
Furthermore, I’m finding that God really does want dreams to come true, and that inactivity and lack of focus have been the major culprits in letting those dreams fade away.
Here at CGA, I am finding the living word of God, but I am also finding what it looks like to apply the Word of God to life. If we choose not to apply the word we limit the ability of God to transform us.
