It wouldn’t be a mission trip if you didn’t get your hands dirty, right? Well I think some of us might have forgotten that a little bit. We came on this trip thinking we would be going out during the night to make relationships with bar girls and then teaching English and baking cookies during the day…boy were we wrong.
Being the type of girl that I am and the way that I was raised I have no problem getting my hands dirty while I am doing some hard work…. well dad your training is coming in handy! We have been hoeing a mountain of dirt; mowing grass, weed whacking, shoveling gravel, and dredging a lake with the hook of death (my personal favorite). Leave it to our God, the awesome God that is sovereign over the entire universe to speak to me while I am dredging a lake and covered head to toe in manure smelling mud, sweat and families of snails.
Those of you that know me well know that self-image has always been a problem for me (as it is with most girls) – never having a boyfriend didn’t help that either. I have never been able to see myself as beautiful or as attractive and have gotten used to downgrading myself and over the years convincing myself of the lies of the enemy that were implanted years ago. I never saw it as a problem but simply as something that was the truth about the cards that I was dealt and I would just have to deal with. Living in community with 24 other beautiful women of God I knew it was going to come up again and low and behold it reared its ugly head this week.
It was a struggle but one that I was no stranger to. I started to isolate myself and, as embarrassing as this is to admit, started to go into a woe is me mentality. When I vocalized how I was feeling to some friends and family that I love and trust then God began to rock my world from head to toe. He surrounded me with encouragement and the truth of scripture not only from those that I had voiced my struggle to but also from many of the girls around me that had no idea that I had been struggling with this.
God began to love on me and remind me that he is the king and that I am his heir and I have been empowered and called by him for great things and that he is the Lord of all creation who does not make mistakes in any shape or form. This realization finally sunk in when I was dredging the lake at the land (aka throwing a giant hook attached to a giant chain into the water, pulling it back and collecting whatever lake gook comes with it). One of the girls who had a much cleaner job was making a comment joking around about how good I was looking covered in mud and when I returned with the normal comment about how she must be blind etc, Mr. Mark our missionary contact chimed in. Mind you I wasn’t aware he was even paying attention to the conversation. He made a comment about how I shouldn’t speak “that rubbish” over myself and went on to tell us stories about how so many of the Thai women that have come through SHE do the same thing and how dangerous it can be.
At that moment suddenly it all clicked. I couldn’t explain it thoroughly if I tried but suddenly all of these truths about my self-image that I have known in my head for years suddenly hit my heart. I have never felt so loved and so confident in my life – mind you at this point I was physically disgusting from the working we had been doing. But for possibly the first time in my life I begun to live in the truth that I am a daughter of the most-high king, that is fearfully and wonderfully made and that has been created for a purpose that will glorify the creator in a way that he has set aside for me.
I am so excited about living in this truth. John 8:32, has never had so much meaning “ And you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free”. I have been set free, I am loved, I am called and God has great things for me! I cannot wait to see what my marvelous creator has in store for me 
