I am still in the thick of study abroad. Only a month to go. But when I look at how much I accomplished in the first month of my studies, it doesn’t look so short.
Living in Belgium has taught me so many things. Here is the spiritual update.
I have questioned God and been filled with more doubts than I have in all my years combined, I’m sure. I have learned how to side-step questions about God and church and provide other excuses for not being available to go to events. I have come to see how those around me can attribute obvious God-instances to other things. I have tried to be accepted by other students before I remembered to pray. I have at times forgotten the point to standing out. I have floundered in prayer.
I have found a deep assurance of God’s reality to a level I didn’t know I would ever need while living in my home in Australia. I have seen church in a different culture and gained a much greater understanding of what it means to be united by the truth and work with the differences. I have learned how to look like Christ in the mire of university parties and on long trips where hunger and tiredness eat away normal hindrances to grumbling. I struggled with shining or speaking the Gospel and found a way to do both without Bible-bashing my friends.
I worship a God who is capable and interested enough in human lives to cause a non-Christian friend of mine to say that it can’t have been just chance that brought us together as friends, but rather the very fact that we are such good friends is making her more aware of God. How blessed am I to be part of that!
I have lived in a wonderful family who have had terrible events take place this semester. In God’s mercy, these events ended better than they could have ever hoped. And the family asked me to thank God on their behalf. And they said one night that they do not believe in God, but there must be some higher being who put me here this semester instead of any other student.
In the journey my mind has taken in trying to understand God while abroad, I realised that if God isn’t working in the world around me, there is little point in living for Him before my dying breathe. If God isn’t capable of interacting on earth or does not care to do so, then the coming of Jesus makes way less sense. My life up to now has provided me with undeniable evidence that God is at work. And if He is at work then I need to look for it, praise Him for it and ask Him to do more. Thus, prayer is essential in my life.
God has done much more and I failed and succeed many more times than I have written about. Wherever God takes a person, He stretches them. That has been my experience here.
ausbelgiumgirl 