As we are winding up our stay here in Africa and packing for the plane ride we will be catching in the next couple of days, I think we all have been caught up in taking inventory of the last 8 months. It has been a journey, that is a fact, and all begin to wonder if something was gained or if all was merely lost. I look back and can say, with all assurance, that it was nothing like I expected. I learned nothing like what I expected to learn, and found things about myself that I didn't even knew existed. I think if I was going to give a name to the theme of this trip it would be...finding who I really am in Christ. It became a journey of healing and freedom of returning to the naked identity of who God has made me to be.The freedom of that identity hidden within Christ my Savior and my Friend. It is rather funny. I came here to save the world and set Africa free, when really it was Africa who set me free. Free from all the junk that I have kept hidden in the recesses of my soul. K.C. said it to me the other night. She was looking through my pictures one night and saw something that brought clarity to that which I was trying to put into words. She said, "It was like you didn't know who you were back then. But now you know and you carry within you now a deeper peace that others can feel when they simply sit beside you." And she was right. I didn't complete know who I was before now. I was always trying to become someone else for everyone I met. A professional "man-pleaser." I'm not saying that I am completely were I need to be or even were I want to be, but Africa has, in some way or another, brought me leaps and bounds onto a road that I will be traveling until I die. The road of becoming more like Him, but first I had to discover who He has called me to be not what man and this world wants me to be. It is a freedom in being yourself, a confidence you find when you discover the treasure in placing your trust in who He sees you as and not what the world sees you as. It is a place I have been fighting for all my life and when I ceased fighting and simply began trusting, He gave it to me. Freedom. I didn't even realize what I had gained until I sat down and asked. It seems like that is the way it usually happens. You spend your whole life fighting for something and than when you finally give up and surrender it into His hands, He gives it to you. The sad thing is, is that you usually never realize the gift His given you or even that He has given you a gift because you are so caught up on the next fight you are bound on winning and find that you can't win. I wonder if this is making any sense at all. I look back on my life and see so many things He has brought me through, healing He has constantly enacted in my life, and realized that 9 out of 10 times I have never even acknowledged it or realized it. He is so, so, so good. And I pray that I will begin to become more sensitive to the work the Spirit is doing constantly around me and never cease thanking Him for it. Even if I don't see it or feel it yet, but simply can trust in the fact that I know He is constantly in the work of perfecting and bringing into completion that which He has started in each of those He calls His own.

     I look back and say with all confidence that I have been blessed beyond belief. He has given be gift upon gift, blessing upon blessing, and they are things that I never would have received in the same way if He had not brought me to Africa. It was only in a foreign and secluded place that such things could be birthed. I can now say, with a little trepidation, that if I had to do it all over again I would. That is to gain that which He has given. I think most of us can't even realize what He has exactly wrought and begun in each of us. Maybe we are not suppose to until much later, when our hearts are ready to receive it. But I can say beyond a doubt that He has done something, and that this journey was not in vain. Nothing He does, no road He brings you through, is walked or done in vain. His word does not return to Him void but completes that which He set it out to do. I can trust in that, in that I can rest.