I am pretty much going to be God’s gift to the world. That is kind of how I once felt anyway. Nurtured and raised in a faithful, godly home, happily married to the man who held all my firsts, surrounded by a loving and stalwart community of believers, and loaded with an arsenal of culture, Christian living, and theology books under my belt, I was eager and ready to gift the world with my faithfulness. 

God had instilled in my husband and me a passion for outreach and ministry since we were both very young, so shortly after we were married I began volunteering as a mentor at a crisis pregnancy center in addition to our involvement in the church. Certainly God would use my knowledge and years of steady obedience to impact the lives of these needy women and lead them to Jesus. How soon I became frustrated though! It was not with those I came into contact with that I was frustrated; it was with my own inability to connect. I saw other mentors stepping and speaking into the lives of their clients in a way that formed lasting relationships and produced gradual, positive change and encouragement. I usually felt like I was talking to a wall. How could I empathize with these women whose lives and experiences were so radically different from my own?

I stopped volunteering after the birth of our first child and then as our family expanded I soon became buried in the ministry to my little ones at home. The self sacrifice of raising small children was itself a hands on education of what true ministry looks like. But I still didn’t quite see the layers and layers of self righteousness and pride that were towering walls between me and those I wanted to minister to, inside and outside my home, and God in his mercy began to chip away at them. His tool was suffering. Real, wounding, heartbreaking, confusing, painful suffering. As God took our family through difficult circumstances beyond our control, I knew for the first time what helplessness felt like. Answers fled and I struggled for God’s presence, but in darkness my nakedness was exposed. It was there that my hands and heart began to understand what my head had known, that I was absolutely nothing without Christ.

He does not need me, he does not need my obedience, but in his kindness and his grace he draws me into his story and bids me die to my own righteousness that I may live in his. When I am ministering to another human being, someone made in the image of God and fashioned with his own hand, I have to recognize that I am just as desperate as they. From there I can step into their story, intertwining mine with theirs and pointing them to the only hope that either of us have. And so often during times that I have been able to lay aside my ego long enough to really hear and engage in another person’s story, I feel like it was mine that became the richer for it.

So I am on a long road of learning what it means to “help fix the broken world” as my five year old says, but I have learned that people become projects and another check on my to-do list of good works if I am trying to do justly and love mercy without walking humbly with my God. All ministry is ultimately by him, through him and for him, and I am just so thankful that I get to come along for the ride.