Look how far you've come.

What I've realized these last three weeks is that what we have chosen to do is not easy.

I'm not talking about the BUGirl team. Leaving our homes, our comfortable places, our comfortable people. I'm not talking about the long days, the long drives, the short nights. The strange beds, strange faces, strange and unfamiliar towns. The lack of a surrounding that is stable and permanent. I'm not talking about these ten months, this year, or the year after that.

I'm talking about following Christ in general. So often Christianity is presented as a band-aid solution. "Here put this on, look, you can't see the hurts anymore." There's this notion that Jesus can magically and quickly fix all your problems. He is the easy fix. An instant solution. What I've been learning is that this isn't always true. While he absolutely has the power to enter a life and radically change it, something else has to follow that radical change. That's the hard part. That's the part where it's our responsibility to come alongside God and work a little. Work a lot. That's what I mean when I say that what we've chosen to do isn't easy.

When you say yes to God, it doesn't mean you've allowed him into your life so he can clean it up and leave. It means you've invited him to be a witness to you whole life. To watch the good with the bad. Not just to watch, but to stop you anywhere along the way and call you out. It means you're constantly listening to him as he tells you what needs to be left behind, cut out, put back in, turned around. It means you hand over control and say...you know best. It means you're listening to him when he says "let go, move on, step forward." It means that you're constantly aware that everything you know, everything you have, and everything you have been given is from God alone. It means your whole life becomes about giving everything back to the God who gave you everything.

There is nothing easy about that. It goes against everything that comes naturally, everything we're taught from birth, every automatic human instinct we possess. But.

It is the best hard thing I have ever done. Because while God is in my life directing, steering, guiding and challenging, he is also loving, encouraging, restoring, and inspiring me. As he's calling me out on my weaknesses he's giving me everything I need to grow and use my strengths. After he sits me down and gives me a new mountain to climb he inspires and completely fulfils me so I'm ready to do what needs to be done. When I feel overwhelmed, he turns me around and says "Look how far you've come."

That is the God I serve. The God I chose, the God who chose me.