I'm not going to deny this: I have a problem.
It's a $27,000 problem.
This is the amount of money I still owe on my student loans. The loans I took out so I could get the degree I would need to do the ministry I was designed to do. The loans that are the major thing standing directly in front of me going to India to do said ministry.
Yeah, those loans.
Over the past few months, it has been fairly easy for me to concentrate on just getting myself to India this time. It's a sizable undertaking (as evidenced by the 200 bracelets and counting) but it has seemed quite achievable. These loans are not. Thank you Jesus, I can make the dang payments. But that is it. And when I say that, please understand: my current bare-bones budget, even without this mission trip, would leave me with around 30 extra dollars every month. It has been this way, ironically (or maybe not so ironically), since around the time I decided to go to India last year.
It has been easy to just say, "Yay, I'm going to India for 2 months!" But then what?
I can not sustain the expenses for these trips. Eventually, everybody I know is going to own a bracelet. And like it or not, I'm finding that having my heart on a different continent has a huge personal cost. People close to me can notice it. I'm not always completely 'present' in what's going on in front of me because my mind is somewhere else entirely. And to make matters even more interesting, the dream keeps expanding beyond just helping these kids right now to having an entire life in this. I keep seriously asking and God if this is really what I'm supposed to do and He keeps giving me more to go on. Pretty soon, the decisions I start making will not just affect me, my life, and my family anymore.
Let me tell you, this is scary. How in the world do I do this? How do I have a huge calling that keeps intertwining itself into more areas of my life, with a student loan that would make it so I couldn't enter the mission field for several years?
How has our family moved all over this dang country multiple times and still had what it needed, both to go there and when we got there? How did we go for months without income without starving or ending up homeless? How did I have a house to live in and a car every time I needed it in Oregon? Or, better yet, how do I have a house to live in and a car right now? How did I get to India the last time?
God did it. This is the only answer I have. And if God has called me to India, then that's what He'll do again. It's crazy, I know. But it really comes down to a song I sang when I was 10 at summer camp. I had forgotten this little song, until recently. But now I remember singing it at 10 years old and feeling the call of God on my life:
Here I am, Lord
Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night
I will go Lord
if you lead me
I will hold your people in my heart.
If God says go, then I'm going. I will make this jump.
