I can still remember the preacher asking, “If you feel that God is calling you to the mission field, I want you to stand up.” I didn’t wait. Quickly I rose to my feet, an awkward teenager, confident in my calling. I knew with all my heart that one day I would be a missionary.
Years passed. I graduated from college with a degree in nursing and moved back home to begin my career as an oncology nurse. It wasn’t the mission field I had dreamed about, but I hoped to gain some experience while waiting on God’s direction.
That same summer, a young man moved to our city to start medical school and started attending my church. He was clean-cut, polite, and spoke with a southern accent. I still remember the conversation my father had with him in the lobby one Sunday after church. “Why do you want to go into medicine?” my father asked. “I want to earn a lot of money,” the young man said plainly and simply.
That was all I needed to hear.
I was definitely not interested in this new guy. I had just returned from a month-long missions trip in Nepal. We hiked the mountains, lived out of a backpack, and I wore the same pair of hiking boots for a month. I was interested in sharing the gospel; he was interested in becoming wealthy. We were clearly headed in different directions.
However, as time went on God opened our eyes and hearts to each other. I became confident that he was the one I was to marry. Just as confident as I was the day I stood in church declaring that God was calling me to the mission field.
After a year of dating, we got engaged at Christmas and married on a beautiful June day.
For the first 8 years of our marriage, I lived with a question in the back of my mind that I could not answer.
Had I been wrong about whom I married, or wrong about the mission field? I was confident that God had called me to be a missionary. I was also confident that God had called me to marry the young doctor whose one pursuit in life was to make money. However, the two never made sense. I often pondered this question in my heart, never sharing it with anyone.
Then one day something happened that I will never forget. With tears in his eyes, my husband sat me down to share what had happened earlier in the day. He began to explain that he felt God had stopped him on his way to our bedroom and asked him the question. “Son, what are you doing with your life?” “You have claimed me as Savior, but you haven’t made me Lord.” While standing in the hall that day, my husband felt the Lord ask him to leave behind his career in medicine and follow Him in a new direction.
In that one moment, everything made sense.
I wasn’t wrong about either decision. It was such a moment of freedom and confirmation, as I shared with my husband what I had wondered all 8 years of our marriage.
Since that day, God has taken us on the most amazing journey. I learned that just because I don’t understand where He is leading at the moment, it doesn’t mean that I am wrong. I tend to see the story He is writing with my life only from my current point of time, yet He sees it from the end to the beginning. It was the Lord who put the desire for ministry in my heart, and He was also the one who put the deep love for my husband in my heart as well. He was there when I secretly wondered if I had made a mistake or just missed His will.
He was also there the day it all came full circle and I sat in amazement of a God who is writing a story where every detail points to His greatness.
I often think about those in the bible who also wondered if they had made a mistake, yet realized in one moment they weren’t wrong. Imagine what Noah felt like the day he first saw a drop of rain. Abraham could probably never forget the moment he first felt his promised son kick in his wife’s belly. What about the disciples when the tomb was empty or when they saw Jesus ascend into heaven?
What a moment Joseph experienced when his brothers came and bowed down before him. All of those years he spent in the pit waiting and wondering if he had been wrong about the sheaves bowing down to him. Yet in that one moment, when they stood before him, he probably thought, “I wasn’t wrong all those years! God did what He said He would do!” More than thinking he wasn’t wrong, he probably saw that God was with him the whole time.
I love this quote about waiting by Charles Spurgeon,
“If the Lord Jehovah makes us wait, let us do so with our whole hearts; for blessed are all they that wait for Him. He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us; it tries faith, exercises patience, trains submission, and endears the blessing when it comes. The Lord’s people have always been a waiting people.”
Now my husband and I find ourselves in a different waiting period. I am reminded that waiting is hard. It requires us to search deep within us and examine our lives. We must consider what we truly believe, what we fear, and who is in control! I have realized my faith becomes weak when I take my eyes off the Master and look at the waves
Peter Marshall expresses this thought well when he says, “Teach us, O Lord, the disciplines of patience, for to wait is often harder than to work.”
If you find yourself waiting for the fulfillment of a promise don’t give up! We have this promise in Isaiah 40:31 “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint!”
Tiffany says
Oh, Kim! I so needed this today! Your writing is a form of ministry to so many!
Kim@kimborders.com says
Thank you Tiffany!I appreciate your kind words!
Leslie Newman says
Kim, loved this encouraging word! Thank you fir sharing your story! 💜
Kim@kimborders.com says
Awe Leslie, Thank you so much!
Jodi Williams says
Kim, you are an amazing woman, wife, mother and a Godly woman seeking after the Heart of God and sharing the Heart of God with others; you are a role model for your children as you have encouraged them to use their talents for the Lord and the Lord has equipped each of them to perform for the Glory of the Lord and share the Good News. Your sensitivity to the Holy Spirit will guide you in the direction that God has designed a task for you to do. I will be in prayer. <3
Kim@kimborders.com says
Thank you so much Mrs. Jodi! I am so appreciative of Godly women like you who poured into my life when I was younger! I still remember our days in missionettes and you talking about memorizing 1 Cor 13 while sitting outside. Thank you for your prayers! I appreciate them very much!