Kelly Stewart is an amazing woman of God who we are so excited to share with you all today! She is a true southern girl…so it helps to read her post with a southern twang! 🙂 You can also read more from her on her blog, www.kellystewart.org
Enjoy!
Six years and one month ago, God wrecked my heart.
He held up a very big mirror that revealed the condition of my heart….and I was shocked. You see, I had spent years striving and building a the most awesome Christian life. I went to seminary and got a degree. I went to grad school and got another. I was married to an amazing man, I had three young children that I got to stay at home with each day. I was remodeling our seventies rancher and working part time to get “out of the house.” We had a yellow lab for crying out loud.
My husband, Jason, was a pastor, so we were at the church constantly. We had surrendered to ministry years ago and we were climbing the church ladder. We had amazing friends, with whom we did life, and small group. We vacationed, had extended family living nearby and filled our days with private school, soccer, church activities and family outings. We spent our days saying we wanted to build the Kingdom, but if you looked at our calendar and our checkbook, we were building the next great soccer player and Target.
We were living the Christian family dream.
So as a part of our desire to live out our faith, my husband and I traveled to Africa on a mission trip, because let’s be honest…is there any other place on the planet that represents the “send me Lord” act of sacrifice more than Africa? Nope. We were even hard core in our choice of where we would spend a week sharing the Gospel.
In all honesty, we didn’t set out to build our own life and fit God into in a way that kept us comfortable and safe…it just kind of happened. We really did desire to build the Kingdom, we just somehow built our own kingdom and then worked to keep it running.
We were displaying the character of Jesus,or at least we thought. It just became somewhat skewed. For example…
Hospitality= working all day to make sure my house is spotless, my meal is 100% home-cooked, pinterest worthy decor and still look effortless before I would extend an invite to friends.
The problem with this is the minute your friends don’t comment on how nice your home looks or how delish your meal was, you strive harder and harder the next time to get that praise and compliment. And your identity becomes more wrapped in the praise of Man and less a reflection of the identity you received from Christ at salvation.
So Africa…changed me and began a shift inside me that was both tragic and beautiful at the same time.
We were in a remote village in Guinea, telling stories of Jesus and visiting with the women and children. The missionary we were working with had a 9 year old daughter who had asked to hold a baby adn her Mom warned her the baby had no diaper. Here is an excerpt from my blog….
“Their daughter asked to hold the baby and she warned her, that it could have an accident on her since they don’t wear diapers. She just had a dress on. Sure enough, 5 minutes later, she peed on K. She was not happy. I took her and kind of held her out in front of me. This was my first conviction of the day. I held a little baby away from me. Why? Because I didn’t want to be teeteed on, I didn’t want to hold a baby with no diaper. I am not proud of myself. It was in that moment, in that village surrounded by children, that the story we had just told, pierced my heart. I was just so overwhelmed.
Completely overwhelmed and I felt totally alone in that moment. As I have had time to think through this, because all these emotions just flashed through me then, I can say that I was afraid. I was afraid of germs, I was afraid of the dried snot on their faces, the dirt on their hands, the feet with goat droppings caked to the bottoms of them.
But more than anything, I was afraid of opening my heart too much, of thinking through the reality that this is their life, and of what the Lord would ask of me.
I mentally began to shut down at this point. This is not something that I write easily. I think how you think you will respond, is often different when you are in the moment. Sometimes, the Lord reveals your true character, He breaks through some well built walls and reveals your sin. He did that with me, in that moment.”
And thus began the journey from living “arrows in” to living “arrows out.” It began the journey of God ripping apart every notion I ever had that living for Him somehow meant comfort and easy sacrifice. Because for us, those days were done.
God took that “Baby away” moment to haunt me, to continually wreck me and finally lead us to a place of adoption. Three years after that moment, we brought our son home from Ethiopia. Our son, who was being knit together in his mother’s womb across the continent of Africa, while I was sitting in a remote village rejecting another child.
Judson Obsi came to us as a scared, traumatized little boy and God would once again use a mere baby to prune and break and reveal more areas of our hearts that were not reflecting His heart. Parenting Judson, grafting him into our family, brought me to a place of complete and utter abandonment to my Savior and gave us a new lense of seeing the world. I could no longer pretend I had a clue to what it meant to daily surrender to Jesus because I was in desperate need of Him every moment! The easy, safe, comfortable Christian life we had built felt more and more like a pair of shoes that had grown too small. We knew we had to make some radical changes in how we spent our days.
During this time, we were given the opportunity to move from our home in Nashville to spend a year in Seattle. Our church had a campus in Seattle that they asked us to go be apart of and we leapt at the chance. God gave us a year with more margin to begin to assess what He was saying to us and what we were going to do about it. We began to study how Jesus lived and how He made disciples. We looked at how He spent His days with the Father, His disciples and with the crowds. We prayed about how we could live as a FAMILY on MISSION. We began to get super focused in how we spent our time, making sure we incorporated times with the Father, time with family and time investing in those around us who were far from Christ. We filtered our family decisions through the lense of living UP, IN, and OUT. Not just saying it, but having to make it intentional, like going to the grocery store with A list, because it was not coming naturally. We started incorporating predictable rhythms into our life that reflected our desires to live Up, live IN and live OUT because it was too important to miss. We began to look at what areas of our life we were clinging to, believing they would give us our sense of worth and identity and then, release them back to the Father for His use and His purpose. We repented of the idols we had made out of good things, believing they were the work of our hands, instead of a gift from the Father. We turned off the tv, spent hours in the Word, and communicated the hidden places of our heart. It was grueling, yet gloriously freeing. We finally released our story, our journey, and our identity into the hands of our loving Father.
And, we opened up our hearts, our minds, and life to where the Father wanted us.
Sixteen months ago, God moved us from our home in Nashville, our family, our friends, and all things familiar to be apart of a church in the Sacramento area. We have determined AS A FAMILY that our heart is to make disciples of Jesus, who make disciples of Jesus, who make disciples of Jesus. For us, that means we are investing in the parents of our kid’s friends, the other soccer moms, the neighbor down the street and those who want to live like Jesus did.
The reality is to live and love like Jesus, you have to be investing in those who are far from Him and daily surrendering your self imposed boundaries and those things you feel entitled too.
Living missionally, for me, means being continually broken over those areas of my life that do not reflect the heart of God and begging Him to let me see the world around me with mercy and grace. And then actually being around people, inviting them into my less than clean home with a good enough meal. It means getting messy, vulnerable, and giving up my idea of how my time is to be spent. It simply means investing in people.
We all want our lives to matter….now I just want my day to matter for my Father.
-Kelly