a call.

The last night of tcx they played some music and flashed some quotes on screen before the speaker. They were the typical inspirational, go-to-the-ends-of-the-earth-with-the-gospel quotes.

And they are great. I could try to expound on them, give you my opinions about them, or arguments supporting them, but i'll just leave you with wise words that cannot be said any better way:

• "And people who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives… and when the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted." - Nate Saint
• "Had I cared for the comments of people, I should never have been a missionary." - C.T. Studd
• "You can do something other than working with God in His purpose, but it will always be something lesser, and you couldn't come up with something better." - Steve Hawthorne
• "If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him." - C.T. Studd
• "The more obstacles you have, the more opportunities there are for God to do something." - Clarence W. Jones
• "Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't." - John Piper
• "It will not do to say that you have no special call to go to China. With these facts before you and with the command of the Lord Jesus to go and preach the gospel to every creature, you need rather to ascertain whether you have a special call to stay at home." - J. Hudson Taylor

Ok I lied. After reading them again, I do want to highlight this final quote by J. Hudson Taylor. This summer on project, a staff intern challenged the way we think about missions. I honestly didn't know the guy very well at the time, and don't remember everything he said that night. Whether they were his words or he borrowed them from a famous writer, he said this: Don't do missions when God tells you 'yes.' Go until he says 'No.'

Immediately, my paranoid mind says, there's no way I can apply that to my life. If I tell God I'll go until He says No, He will end up calling me to missions for the rest of my life. Paranoid.

But the guy had a point. While this has been in the back of my mind since Brasil, I've actually begun to think about it recently and consider the ways I could 'go' until God says no. I'm expecting that God has a specific plan for me after graduation. I don't know what it is yet. I'm ok with not knowing, probably only because graduation is still 11 months away. So I don't feel this special call on my life right now to do any specific thing after graduation. Will I let that get in the way of being involved in Christian ministry?