Superman or the Kid Next Door?

  As trick or treaters embark on a candy adventure one can't help but see a crazy parallel between them and real life.  Each halloweener wears a crazy get-up or disguise as they seek to hunt down every last drop of candy a town has to offer.  But underneath those crazy costumes are the same little kids that bike past our house on their way to school or who we see shopping with their parents in the store.  The same seems true for us. As a child growing up in the church I used to look at missionaries that were visiting and think wow those people must be really holy to be a missionary or their walk with God must be better than most for God to call them overseas.  It always seemed that missionaries were a notch above the rest of us normal people as they served God wherever He called them.  Only special people got to go reach the lost, you have to be a person who has their life completely in order.  You cannot doubt your faith or struggle with any sin.  These were prerequisites to what I thought was standard missionary protocol.  Now that it is a reality for us we truly have realized that God uses imperfect, ordinary people to do His will.  We at times struggle with faith and obedience in our walk with the Lord and we still disagree and sometime argue in our marriage.  Yet, we have this amazing God who has out of His great mercy has chosen to use us as He works in Mozambique.  What a privilege and blessing!  That to us is amazing grace. 

As we have started to prepare for this upcoming journey we have been praying that God would use us to bless people as we share the vision of Mozambique.  What an irony that as we seek to bless others, we are much more abundantly blessed in return.  God has used our home church to bless us through the people there, especially the number of people who have told us they will be committed to pray for us over the next several months.  God truly is at work in His people in our home town and across the seas in Mozambique.  We are so blessed to be able to join  His work there and to have numerous ordinary, yet God empowered people standing with us as we follow His call for our lives. 

So even though we must now don the uniform/costume of a missionary we really are just ordinary people, who we pray, because of Christ, will be used to extraordinary things for Him.