My Story… Part 6
Just before the second year of Bible College I went to visit a local Asian church congregation. During the prayer ministry time, the pastor’s wife prayed for me. She prophesied that I would meet a guy who would also have a desire to go to India and we would go back out again together as husband and wife. Then she added that she didn’t think it safe for me to go and work in India alone. Because she’d added her own opinion at the end, I disregarded the whole thing and thought it might just be her own ideas.
The second year of college was one of the happiest years of my life! I came into a new season. The first year had been like winter; A long lonely walk through some valleys found deep within my soul. But, God had laid a foundation that first year. I had given space for Jesus to begin a great work in my heart. God revealed to me the kind of life I had left behind and the new life he wanted to give me. I no longer felt that I was aimlessly wondering in a desert, but that I had set my feet on a path in the right direction. My life journey now had a deeper meaning and was being guided by God. I had been single for a year and was content with God.
It was during my second year that I was blessed with a very large room in the girls dorm! I spent many hours alone in that room. I love my family and missed them a lot! I would set aside time each week to pray for each one of them by name. The most beautiful thing I learnt from that time was that my identity does not rest in my gifts, abilities, who others say I am, or in dating guys. My true identity rests in that I am a child of God. Being single meant I could spend more time with God and If I could no longer sing tomorrow I would be just as valuable as any other person. I believe that first and foremost God wants relationship with people, he wants your heart, he wants you as you are and he wants to make you whole as a person. This is what I was learning.
I was quite cautious to enter into music, as it has been very central in my life before knowing Jesus. But during my second year at Bible college alongside my prayer journaling I started to pick up my guitar and would sing songs of worship in my room. It was during this time that I wrote a song ‘Praise your name’. Despite everything else going on in my life, I wanted Jesus to be the only one that I fully rely upon, the one I seek after, the one I keep close in my heart. I will probably share the recording of this song later on in another blog. Nowadays it’s a real joy for me to sing, because I no longer sing for self worth, but I sing because I love God, I love people, and I enjoy music. I feel God’s joy when I sing and it blesses others at the same time. There is a heart cry that comes from deep within me when I sing to others about the love of God. I feel my music has so much more depth and meaning since I met the one who created it in the first place.
I would often use my room as a place for me and the other girls to hang out and worship. This was a time when we would get together and chat, eat and share what God was doing in our lives. Sometimes we would find ourselves walking with each other through difficult and challenging times or in better seasons we’d just have a really good laugh together! There is nothing quite like a true friend to be there at your side, hold your hand, take the time to listen and empathise, pray with you and bring you right back into a place of joy and laughter.
I have been blessed with a lot of good friends from Bible college. It was during my second year that I found myself getting quite close to Josh Morley, one of the guys in the first year class. We went on bike rides together each week with our friends to a church in the city centre. He seemed like a very caring person. As our friendship grew, my feelings began to increase for him as more than a friend but I put this to the back of my mind.
I kept praying about my friendship with Josh and God’s plan for my life. Just before the end of the second year, I found Josh in the library applying to go to India for a summer mission trip. I was also planning to go and visit Josh in Chester that summer as I was going to visit a Bible college in the area. He had been praying for guidance and God’s will for us, if there was to been an ‘us’. I remember going to visit Josh that summer, sitting in his parents garden one night with two of our friends (who are also married now) and looking up at the stars together. It was then that Josh told me he loved me! Before I had came to faith in God, I’d had relationships, all of them centered around ‘the physical’ aspect of relationship and most with ugly endings, but none compared to the beauty of what I was experiencing with Josh. He took time to date me, to get to know me as a friend, we talked together, laughed together and prayed together.
The world around us pressures women especially to reveal our physical beauty and give ourselves away ‘physically’ in order to find the right partner. But amongst the hype and fake glamour we can easily forget to reveal our inner beauty first, which is the most attractive, life giving, long term essence of a person. Allowing Josh to be my hero first and win my heart was a challenge and made me feel quite vulnerable compared with what the world has taught me to do, but it was the best thing I ever did in a relationship. I have learnt that it’s easy to win someones admiration for your physical appearance, but to captivate their heart is something else…
Part 7…. When ‘My Journey became Our Journey’…. continues
