stories

Since we’ve been here we have spent one evening a week at Bonita’s house. They always feed us something for dinner that’s not Thai, which we love. The Thai food is great, but it’s nice to have a little taste of home.

We had all read a book that Bonita had asked us to read called, To Be Told. It’s about our stories and how God uses us and our stories for His glory.

Last week Bonita, her husband Roy, and Mary shared their stories with us. This week Rachel and I shared ours. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful to see the places that each of us has walked through and the ways that those things have shaped us into the people we are.

One thing that I realized as all of us shared our stories was that the greatest impacts in our stories were usually caused by people. God used people in each of our lives to change our stories in a big way.

Part of To Be Told said:

“God wants us to relieve suffering, pursue justice, facilitate reconciliation, and free the heart to love, but he desires for us to do so in a way that reveals his character. It is not enough just to do well for others or to do things well. We must do well in our unique way in order to reveal the vast creativity of a God who loves to bring change through the most unlikely channels.

Therefore our way of engagement may be to pray, administrate, teach or serve. Or it could be to juggle, sing, mime, or paint. Or lead, confront, repair, or nurture. Each of us will do what we do with a style that reveals something about God in a way that no one else can.”

All of the girls that we have become friends with while we have been here have stories that seem terribly unfair. Shaped by a culture that doesn’t value them, a family that only values them for how much money they can get from them, regardless of what they have to do to earn that money, and by men who use them as toys created solely for the purpose of their own pleasure, leaving them feeling used and empty.

I pray that God would be able to use me to impact the stories of some of these precious girls. Although it hurts when I think of the part of their stories that they are walking through now, I pray and hope for a day that God would bring them out of the darkness they are experiencing now, and into the light of His amazing love.