DTS Changed My Life
This week marks the last week of the 2017 Bilingual DTS lecture phase, and our students are about to head off on overseas outreach. We have fourteen students, and each of them has been changed by the truth of God's unrelenting love. Watching God change these students has reaffirmed my heart for discipleship. It is my vision to see broken people taken into the care of God's family to be healed and changed.
I was not staffing this Discipleship Training School (DTS), but I was able to serve by helping prepare lunch during the three-month lecture phase. During lecture phase, each week is focused on a specific subject, like Spiritual Warfare, the Character and Nature of God, or Worship. A different speaker is invited to teach each subject. Now that the lecture phase is complete, the students have left for their overseas outreach phase. They have been split into two teams and sent to two different parts of Asia.
Watching the students grow and change reminded me of my own DTS, and I started to think about how different my life would be if I had never stepped out of my comfort zone that way. I was completely uncomfortable during my DTS, and God used that time to stretch me like I had never been stretched before.
I left every single person I knew and loved to live with a group of strangers. I joined a mission that I had never heard of and knew nothing about. I went to a country of which I had no knowledge, where the language and culture made me feel like I was on another planet. I stepped out in ministry in every uncomfortable way I could imagine, teaching when I did not know how to teach, praying for people when I had no idea what to say, and walking up to strangers who do not speak English to tell them about a God they have never heard of. I grew more in that season than in any other season in my life, probably because it was the most consistently uncomfortable I have been in my life. And, in the beginning, Satan tried to use fear to take it from me.
The day I left for my school, I did not wake up and confidently drive to the airport full of faith and boldness. I was terrified. I wanted to throw up. I cried like a baby. I remember putting my suitcases into the trunk of my car. I was not even prepared with the proper luggage needed to move across the world for five months.
I put the bags into the car and thought clearly: You can still turn back. You can unpack all of your bags. You can get your lecture deposit back. You can enroll in some spring classes at the college. You can easily get your job back. You are still in the "safe zone".
I set down the suitcase and stared at it, carefully considering that thought. It would be so easy to turn back.
But then I had an even stronger thought, a voice speaking clearly to me: Angela, please do not turn back. Come with me. Come to Japan with me. There is something I want to tell you. It was the most tender and gentle voice I had ever heard.
So I closed my eyes, not feeling any better, and decided in my heart that I would go. I would go and see if God meant what he said when he wrote, "Whoever would try to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 16:25).
Shortly after arriving in Japan for that first time, I saw that God was about to turn my world upside-down, and I was in awe of his faithfulness. I realized that I knew absolutely nothing, and I was the luckiest girl in the world. One evening during worship, God was opening up my heart in a new way and pouring love in. Then I remembered what he had said when I was putting my suitcases into the car back home. I asked him, "What is it that you wanted to tell me?" He said, in that same tender way, "I wanted to tell you that I love you. I love you and I am proud of you."
That was the first time I believed those words, and something broke in my soul. He must love me if he would take me to the other side of the world, out of every single thing I knew, just so I could hear his voice. It was that important to him. In my every day life, where everything I did was out of obligation and driven by fear of failure, I could not hear him. He would do anything to reveal his love to me, so he cleared out everything that was standing in the way. This is our king.
This moment was the start of the wildest season of growth in my life. It was initiated by him, and I had to be taught how to receive that love. Actually receiving his love is what changed my life. I was a different person when I returned home.
Before that point, nobody walked me through how to have a relationship with God, and what he was actually like. Nobody showed me what it was like to see the sick healed, or to fight spiritual battles. Nobody told me that I had been lied to, or that the enemy was actually afraid of me. Nobody had sought me out to walk through all of my emotional junk with me. Nobody showed me how to receive God's love.
And now I want to see others have these revelations. I will never stop telling the stories of God's faithfulness, or telling people what he is like, or showing them how they are seen through his eyes. And having God allow me to speak life to his people has been the most fulfilling, exciting, wonderful thing I could have imagined for my life.
