Fuller Life

26.07.23 – Today I am celebrating six years since I moved to Guatemala and started this crazy, wonderful, challenging, exciting adventure with God, that is life and ministry here. One of the most beautiful gifts that God has given me over the years is the realisation that, in His goodness, He called me not just to live in Guatemala but to experience fullness of life here. What I mean is that when I first set off on this journey, I knew I was being called to serve in cross-cultural mission and ministry which involved living in Guatemala for an undefined number of years. Yet, as well as this, at every turn God has shown me His care, His love, His provision, His faithfulness, and I have been blessed to experience said fullness of life with Him in this. I am not under any stretch of the imagination suggesting it has all been easy and pain free. In fact, there have been many hard moments and challenges that have left me hurt, heartbroken and questioning it all.
However, God has repeatedly shown me His grace and helped me learn (forever learning) how to show grace to others. It is wonderful to look back and see how God is teaching me to live more freely and fully in all of life here in Guatemala, one of my earthly homes.

It wasn’t until I packed my life up into two suitcases and three packing boxes and moved over 5,000 miles away and across an ocean that through God’s grace, I started to understand more about fullness of life with and in Him. 
Fullness of life for me is all of it, all the different elements, from the ordinary or even mundane moments to the extraordinarily unique and at times bizarre moments, all saturated with God.

I always had a sense that God had called me to live in Guatemala, to build a life here. Yet for a while I think I found the balance challenging between serving God in ministry, which I used to think of as the mission part of life, and personal/home life, which was the rest of life. Perhaps for a time I sought God more in ministry and mission and involved God a little less in my personal life. Maybe it was just a way of compartmentalising, separating things out, drawing lines in my life to ‘help’ define things. Only it quickly became obvious, in many tangible ways, why that doesn’t work and why life is fuller if all the lines are blurry or better still if they don’t exist at all.  
Mostly because God wants all of us, and He wants us fully not just parts or sections of our lives.
I wasn’t intentionally not letting God into certain areas of my life. I think I just felt like I needed Him more in my ministry or perhaps that He was more interested in those areas.
The truth is I need Him, wholly and completely, in every aspect of my life. And He is wholly and completely interested in all of me, in every area of my life.
Only full surrender to God leads to fullness of life. Only He can lead us into living in the freedom of redemption through His grace and in turn break down the barriers, blur the lines, and reign fully in every part of our lives.
For me it is all about His grace! Being confronted and convicted of sin, repenting, and experiencing God’s indescribable grace in my life set, and continually sets, me free to live fully.

A big part of fullness of life for me (but not exclusively) has been allowing God to teach my heart what my head knew; that mission also has an ‘all of life’ element. I have always been intentional and careful when talking about mission to tell myself and others that if we are part of God’s family then we are also part of His mission. However, for a time I think I created a ‘mission box’ in my life. As a ‘missionary’ I put work and ministry related things in my ‘mission box’ and everything else was just my life. As I mentioned above, without realising it that meant that I invited God into my life a little less and tried to do that part of living more in my own strength. Well, as you can imagine that did not go too well. (Stories I would be happy to share another time).

Thankfully, in His goodness and through His grace, God kept on knocking until I realised there were still some closed doors in my heart. He wants all of me, all the time. How amazing! He even wants the parts of me that I don’t want, so that He can make me complete in Him. It is through His beautiful grace that God has brought me, and continues to bring me, into a fullness of life that helps me surrender all areas of my life.
There is no longer a ‘mission box’ and my life. There is just me and God. I am writing as a work in progress, always in progress on this side of eternity, but also as someone seeking to serve God in His mission simply as part of life with Him. Through God’s strength I’m seeking to surrender more and more and, through His grace, that leads to a richness of life, a fuller life, that only our Good Father can provide.