Surrendering My Mouth

I like writing. I like being able to revise, delete, expand, re-word, and all such great things I learned to do in English class. I like being sure that I can convey my feelings as best I can after perfecting my thoughts in writing.

I (Heather) am not nearly as fond of speaking. I try to be careful about what I say when I want to be clearly understood. I don't want to flub...I might change some one's perception of me! Mostly, I don't want to be wrong.

But God is teaching me something this week. My audience, small or large, hears what God wants them to hear, and I have to trust Him in that.

For the last two years, I have been running the creative activities program for our MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) group here in Woodland Park. I enjoy using my creative talents to come up with things that most of the moms will enjoy during a given meeting. (Lesson already learned: you can't please everyone!) This includes getting on stage with the microphone and explaining what they will be doing, hearing, or learning that day. I introduce people, I give the order of operations, I give instructions, and I always forget to say something. This really bothered me last year. I would feel like I failed because in my mind, I didn't do a sufficient job of explaining. So I tried writing down a list of what I needed to say. That helped some, but it never went as perfectly as I wanted. (Imagine that!) This year was a bit better...I didn't lose sleep over it, at least. (Literally...it was that bad.) It wasn't the being in front of people that I didn't like, it was the feeling like I never did well enough that got me down.

Now Jim and I are in this support raising process and our goal is to be able to sit down with others one-on-one and explain our passion, our call, our work, and our needs to help others understand better what we are taking off to do in 2010. It's pretty enormous pressure to convey exactly what is going on in our hearts to others on our own, without God's help. We were with another couple on Monday night and I was asked a question about my experience in Kenya in 2003 that I was totally not prepared for. In my mind, it was a pretty bad answer...I felt like nothing concise came out of my mouth. I stewed on it after we went home. I wondered what I should do. My perfectionist nature makes me want to sit down, really write out a good answer to the question and somehow make sure they knew my "real" answer. But that's a lot of work, and maybe a little awkward, and just not the thing to do! I felt God reminding me that he speaks through us, and I have to trust that no matter how uncontrolled I feel my words are, others hear what he guides into their ears. He doesn't necessarily perfect what I am trying to convey, but I must trust that my passion and our goals are clearly understood by those He has chosen to understand. And then I can say I did my best.

I'll be on the spot much more that I want to be in the next year, but it isn't about what I'm doing. It's about His work in Africa and how he has made a place for us at RVA so that the parents of the students we will teach and love can reach all corners of Africa and spread the good news. And when it's about God, I should just be jumping out of my shoes to spread the news about his work across the globe.