By His Wounds Ours Are Healed

In these first couple weeks of training we have been emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted.

Sometimes one at a time and sometimes all at once. We have been challenged in every aspect of our faith- how we live it, what we believe, how we pray, when we pray, what we pray, what we’re here for, how we accept God’s love, etc. It is a good and holy-challenged feeling.

We started off with a Healing Retreat. What do we need healing for in the first week? Well apparently, our whole life. Sounds kind of absurd and it seemed strange to be the first thing we’d do, but how quickly we learned the need for healing in our lives (for big and small things; past, present, and future).

I think there is a huge misconception amongst friends, family, and those we meet that we and other missionaries must have some crazy awesome relationship with God to have said yes to this. That we’ve figured it all out, we never miss a chance to pray or go to mass, and we’d go to the ends of the earth for Him if he’d ask. While the last thing in there is true, the preceding ones are not always as much.

In life I have learned to have a great hope in and yearning for God’s love as well as obedience to doing what He asks of me. My love and obedience has allowed me the courage to say yes to foreign missions. But we all get here differently and not always with rocking great prayer lives. Some of us (ahem, all of us) have views of our Father’s love that need to be challenged and revisited. Our views on what love is or isn’t are created young- primarily by our parents (their relationship to us and their relationship with each other), but it also includes friends and other family members. Our views on love are constantly changing. Thank God because many of us don’t start out with a perfectly well-rounded view of it! Probably most of us don’t. Your parents might be near-Saints but child rearing is hard, life is messy, and we rarely get out without a few wounds that need to be addressed.

I’m thankful FMC (Family Missions Company) has recognized that and taken the time to address this in the very first week.

As such the first week was a bit more relaxed in the evenings than future weeks will be. We had a Cajun Night (Cajun band and alligator dinner!), Splash Day at a local park, and a Pool Party at one of the local Board of Director’s homes, which I will share pictures and video of. It’s easy to take pictures of all the fun stuff so I hope you all understand that there were many hours in talks, prayer, and small group that week that I’m definitely not taking a camera into! 😊 The amount of emotional work we put in that first week was enough to make you beg for a naptime and we were all very thankful to have fun nighttime events to look forward to.

We certainly didn’t come to Intake expecting to deal with some of these things, nevertheless in the first few days, but WOW how amazing it was.

In recognizing and working through our individual woundedness, coming to grips with Jesus’ great love for us – his delight in us – and working on creating better prayer habits, we are able to more freely move forward with the rest of our missionary training in His presence and by His grace.