Commitment, Consistency and Love

I’ve learned a lot of things during the mission trip to Alaska, but I picked three words to summarize them: Commitment, consistency and love. I’ll talk about each of them.

Commitment
I’ve been reading 2 Chronicles for the past weeks and during the trip, there was a day that I read chapter 15 and it was about King Asa.  He’s probably one of the few “good” kings of Judah.  He was described as “fully committed” in verse 17.  He had awesome qualities and he was encouraged by the prophet by saying, “But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.” (v7)  A lot of things have been happening that has been affecting me big time, but this is reminding me of what I SHOULD do.  Stay committed to God and to His work, no matter what. I really know how things can change and people can change in a blink of an eye, but God never changes! He’s the everlasting God!  My commitment to Him would never disappoint me and would never be in vain.

Consistency

During the mission trip, I was part of an awesome team (praise God!) of thirteen people.  Our team was called OVERFLOW.  My team leaders (TLs) came up with the team name because of the thought of us overflowing with love, from God, to give to the natives we were to meet.  And it’s interesting cause the same day that I read about King Asa, I read about the passage wherein Jesus teaches about the fruit in people’s lives (Matthew 7:15-20; Luke 6:43-45).  And I got this, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.  For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.” (vv. 43-45) How can we have good things stored up in us?  By reading God’s Word and praying. By being consistent in our fellowship with God. It was really awesome how after reading this, I was praying to God to help me carry out His Word and really fill me up with good things so that I will have good things overflowing to the people I meet, then suddenly God gives me this image in my head.  I imagined the water tank that we had in the place we stayed at.  Then I imagined the hose and pipe that connects it to the faucet, and that faucet is where we get our good, clean drinking water.  And I thought, if i put a cup under that faucet, for the water to overflow out of the cup, the hose and pipe has to be connected to the source, which is the water tank.  Then I thought, hey, it’s the same with us.  We can only be overflowing with God’s love and things of God if we’re constantly connected to our Source: God.

Love

LOVE.  It’s probably the most complicated four-letter word that we all know.  People long for it, people try to find it in the wrong places and wrong people, and we people lack this most of the time.  And really, we don’t have LOVE unless we have Christ, the ultimate LOVER. Now, for love, I really didn’t have a passage while I was on the trip, well, besides 1 Corinthians 13, which talks a lot about love and how important it is.  This is how important love is: It’s what Christianity is about.  I don’t know if we think about that or even remember that.  The whole point of Christianity is LOVE, and how a loving God made a way for His justice to be satisfied and for his beloved (us) to be saved at the same time.  Sure, there’s the commandments and other instructions that Jesus gave, but what’s the whole point of those?  LOVE. Yes, love.  Love for God, love for others.  Not legalism, not rules, and definitely not to sort out the perfect from the imperfect, cause we’re all failures.  Hah, I think I already went on to rant about love… But the way that I was reminded by God about love was mainly being on the mission trip and all you are left to do is to love everyone.  God taught me how to love my team and how to love the people of Copper Center.  The people in my team were from different churches, different states and different families, but we all came together for one purpose: share the love of God.  Before we were able to accomplish that goal, we had to love each other first.  Oh, how I thank God that He gave us the strength to love each other and to love other people.  There was a time when our team was walking outside with some of the natives of the village and one teenager said, “What?! You’ve only met each other last week?  I thought you’ve known each other for a while.”  She thought we all grew up together cause that’s how we treated each other.  Love is something that other people will notice as a difference in Christians, if only we actually show it. Remember, it’s what Christianity is about.

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