God is Greater

I think what most affected me this week from Perspectives was from Andy Pearce’s talk. I’ve struggled with balancing honoring my parents with honoring what I thought was a God-given conviction for some time now. I’ve wanted to go to China as a missionary for a few years now, and I thought that was confirmed last summer when I got to go to China as a student studying in a fantastic language immersion program. I had amazing opportunities to share the Gospel with several of my teachers, had great conversations with some of the other students, and even took a relative to church for her first time. And for this summer, I had an internship all lined up with an American company with their branch in China doing research I’m really interested in. So I thought everything was working out and I’d hopefully be on my way to China in a long-ish term way, God-willing, in a bit over a year when I graduate.


But… my mom doesn’t understand why I’d ever want to go to China besides to visit relatives. In her view, it was so hard for her to be able to come to America, she doesn’t understand why I would ever want to leave America. So I haven’t pushed or even talked about going to China for any time longer than a summer with my mom until a couple weeks ago, on Feb 15, when I tried opening that up as a possibility. My mom gave her normal spiel about why America is so great, and before I could reply (which I was planning on doing for the first time), I very distinctly heard/felt God telling me to drop it.


So I did (not easy), and it was like this huge weight had been lifted off of me, but at the same time, like I was drifting and in a large sense purposeless. It’d been such a huge part of my plans and dreams for years now, and I wasn’t sure what to fill that void with. But over the next couple days, I was fairly sure that God was directing me to fill the time I’d been praying about my future in China with praying about my present here in Pasadena. I “coincidentally” ended up on a prayer walk with a friend around the Caltech campus a couple days later. And I felt even more of a burden for Caltech than before. We made plans to continue prayer walking on a regular basis throughout Pasadena. I went to an apologetics conference the following weekend where they encouraged us to live as “living, breathing billboards for Christ” where we are placed right now. In short, it was seeming like God really was telling me to focus for now on where he has placed me (in Caltech / Pasadena). Then, last week, Andy talked about so many ways he has had cross-cultural experiences right here, and I was really convicted that I’d been focusing so much on the chance of future opportunities there, that I’d probably passed up a whole lot of opportunities here.