"Faith never knows where it is being led,
but it loves and knows the One who is leading."
~Oswald Chambers
Headaches from screaming children, marking tests on date nights, and holding my pee until the bell rings were not really what I had expected my vocational life to look like. My family is outnumbered by teachers, and I had always ardently defended the idea that I would never become one. My personal life was also a surprise to me; recently married, my husband and I were settling into our home and planting roots in the city where I had always lived.
What might be so unexpected about this conventional kind of life, you should ask? The fact that I had always expected something quite different. Though a timid and careful child, the freedom that Jesus had brought into my life around 18 years old ushered me into the realization that my life could be an epic adventure. He harnessed my love of fictional adventure stories to show me that He is the best author of real-life stories, and He desires purpose and meaning to be interwoven into each of ours. Biographies about heroes such as Corrie Ten Boom and David Wilkerson showed me how masterfully God could write epic stories in this day and age, igniting my passion to live a life full of courage and surrender.
My life with Jesus started off with one exciting adventure after another. From experiencing God’s enabling grace to work with challenging children, to sharing the gospel in an unreached country, He was teaching me to rely on Him to do hard things. I started to think my life would always look this exciting, and felt a stirring in my heart to live a life worthy of a biography. Though I still felt fear, I desired more to let my life be poured out for Jesus and used for His glory in the most difficult, unreached places of the world. And as I prayed and pursued this, I found God opening doors for me to navigate how to move toward vocational missions in an unreached country.
I began to prepare for what I believed God was calling me into. I connected with others on a similar journey, obtained a teaching degree as a vocational means into any country, and met with many different mission agencies. As these plans culminated, I found myself unable to move forward for a variety of reasons. Even after interviewing with a number of different mission agencies, I did not have any peace about moving forward with them. God began to redirect my attention towards injustices happening within my vicinity, and I began to wonder if He was steering me down a different path. Doors kept closing for missions abroad, and yet opening within my own city. I even found a friendship re-kindling with a man who had similar stirrings in his heart about Jesus and the injustice around us.
Needless to say, I was very confused. Was God truly leading me in a different direction, or was I merely allowing my heart to be swayed by proximity? Or swayed by desires for comfort and familiarity? Like a canoe paddling upstream against a strong current, I tried harder and harder to open the doors that seemed to be closing. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not do it. And even more strangely, I found an increase of peace and assurance when I began to let go of those dreams I had been so sure of.
As life has progressed, I have increasingly realized that I do not have as much control over my life as I once thought. When I was in high school and university, my dreams of the future seemed so idealized and attainable if I set my mind on achieving them. As I tried to bring them to reality, however, I found that the doors would open and close outside of my control. Only if a door was opened by Fate would I be able to walk through it. My control is solely over what I choose to do with the open and closed doors of my life.
Yet I found this truth very hard to accept. I realized that I placed a tremendous amount of value in dedicating my life to the areas where there was most need. Oswald Chambers’ Utmost devotional spoke strongly to me during this season of questioning God’s guiding hand. He wrote:
Yet Jesus never measured His life by how or where He was of the greatest use. God places His saints where they will bring the most glory to Him, and we are totally incapable of judging where that may be.
God wants our lives to produce the most fruit possible for His glory. However, He alone knows how to do that. He was asking me to trust His plan and purpose for my life, even if it did not make sense to me. Just as He had once asked me to surrender my inclination for comfort and familiarity to do missions abroad, He was now asking me to do the opposite. To give up the satisfaction of knowing I was labouring in the most needed areas of the world, and instead be willing to do things that may not seem as purposeful to me, such as raising a family or being a teacher in my hometown.
God has shown me that to be led by Him, I need to abide in Him and not just in my thoughts about Him. Sometimes He will lead us in ways that are not the most logical or what we would expect of Him. A friend put it to me this way: “what do you want more – to do what is 'seemingly right' or follow the Lord?” What a subtle difference! However, I knew I wanted the latter. I needed His direction – Jesus’ presence Himself – in order to really follow Him. And if I disconnected from the branch when He was leading me away from what I expected Him to, the effectiveness of my life would be impacted.
So here I am – a newlywed, working in a public school in my city, sometimes wondering what on earth I am doing here. But at other times, I stand back in amazement at how the Lord has guided me to this place. I am married to a man that I love with my whole heart, who challenges and encourages me to be more of the person God created me to be. His strengths and weaknesses complement mine as though our union was intentional. We are praying with our hands open and starting to make new dreams together – dreams that are all about loving Jesus with our whole lives and sharing His love with those around us impacted by injustice. But even these plans we will hold with an open hand, because we know that God’s plans are not always distinguishable to us. He alone can lead us forward in the path of life. No matter what story He writes for us, whether overseas missions or the "obscurity" of teaching and family-raising (or both!), we will trust that it will bring Him the most glory.
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’ So I went forth, and finding the hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East. (Minnie Louise Haskins)
We are thankful to share this written piece by blogger Rivka Stone!
It’s been our joy to journey with Rivka through different seasons of her ongoing discernment process through Missions Disciplers, Perspectives, Live Called, Book Studies, Church life and more! It’s deeply encouraging how she continues to hold her plans with open hands trusting God well in the path before her.
Link to original:
https://rivkamcstone.wixsite.com/myblog/post/the-one-who-is-leading