My Birthday!

Yesterday I celebrated my 23rd birthday! I cannot believe how the years have passed! haha.
It was an amazing Birthday, definitely a memorable one. I woke up around 6am yesterday to loud music playing, and my roomate running in my room telling me to go look out my window. After a min or two of not wanting to get up, I finally walked over to my window and looked down 3 stories to see one of my very good mexican bands and two young guys singing mariachi songs to me. It was awesome! Although I was half asleep, that is one thing I can say no one has ever done for me before!! Throughout the day I went and visited different friends and got lots of cake. ;) Later on that day I had a picnic with Liz and everyone had a surprise party for me.
I just felt so loved, seriously....

Being Challenged....

So God has been stretching my heart and mind in a lot of ways these past few months.
Today felt like some kind of breakthrough though. Well, maybe not "breakthrough", but I was definitely hit hard with a lot of things.
Right now, our church planting team is reading the book "Christianity Rediscoverd", I haven`t read a whole lot of it yet, but what I have read has seriously hit hard and I feel like brought me to a new place. One of the biggest ways that I feel like God has challenged me though this, ...where my focus is. In this book, it talks about a a people group, who had missionaries for over a 100 years, ...missionaries doing good work. Sharing the love of Christ through serving the people, they had a hospital, a school, all these wonderful things, but the people did not know the real reason they were there. This is sad, seriously sad, but I cannot even tell you how EASY it is to fall into this. "Doing" all these things, but in the sense of eternity, accomplishing very little. We cant forget that our ONE and only purpose of missions is JESUS. All though social issues and helping the community are all important, the truth is that if I do all these things and am not keeping Jesus the main focus, these things will amount to NOTHING in the end.

I am new at the whole missionary thing, I still have a ton to learn, but one thing I can say is that it`s hard sometimes, because I dont want to come across the wrong way to people, there have been mormans, jehovah witnesses here, and lots of different missionaries, and these people know that...so the last thing we want to do is make them think that they are apart of some project, that we want to see how many people we can convert. Our purpose here is NOT to convert them, but to show them Jesus in their own culture. There is a book called " Eternity in their Hearts" that I HIGHLY reccomend, this book just talks about how God is already uniqely in each and every culture of the world, and He manifest Himself in different ways in all of these cultures. So the purpose is not to convert them to what we know, but help them find God in their own culture. The problem is that we come with a package of the gospel, we think that we have something they need and think that we can just hand it to them and we are done. It just doesnt work like them though, we have to bond with the people to know what they need, become incarnational. Through this we can find a whole new aspect of God, through going on this journey to find God with them, we come to know Him so much more.
This all is SO MUCH easier said than done though! What I am really struggling with, is HOW do I get God out of the box I have Him in? How do I truly truly become incarnational? By eating the food, living with them, learning the language? These are all very very important things, but what I am learning right now is that beyond all of these exterior things, it is a MINDSET. It is a daily surrender and dying to yourself and taking my cross.