An Impact That Outlives Myself
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “I used everything You gave me.”
ERMA BOMBECK
As college graduation grew closer and closer, I began contemplating where I wanted to continue my studies in art history, working toward my master’s and eventually my doctorate. The streets of the Queen Anne neighborhood near where I lived became my place of peace and rest. I parked my car blocks away from my favorite spots to sit and read my Bible so I could wander through the beautiful old streets and enjoy God’s goodness and the beauty of all He created.
I walked, prayed, dreamed, and wondered what my future would hold.
Looking back, it was such a sweet and simple time of growth. This probably sounds silly, but I’d often slide into my favorite little black dress, reminiscent of something Audrey Hepburn would wear, don my equally Audrey-esque shades, grab my Discman (please tell me you remember what that is!) with a Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra CD inside, and be on my way.
This was how I’d spend several days a week, quietly playing my theme music because my heart was blooming and falling deeper in love with Christ, and this was my way of folding into it. This was my way of worshipping Him as I realized for the first time that worship could take many forms and needn’t be boxed into simply sitting in a church pew on Sunday morning while singing hymns and choruses. This was how I embraced our time in stillness and conversation together, entwining myself in His beauty and creativity through the sights, smells, and sounds He created. Walking in the drizzling rain most days (welcome to the Northwest), coffee in hand, bag heavy with the weight of my Bible and prayer journal on my shoulder, and a light heart knowing God had big things in store for my little life.
A bench overlooking the Space Needle at Kerry Park or a cozy spot in Parsons Gardens became places I’d sit in stillness with Him. Here, God whispered to me and impressed things upon my heart. I knew I wanted a life out of the ordinary, though I was searching for what that really meant. I knew what I was passionate about and what my heart desired. But was that truly God’s best for my life? Did I actually embrace the idea that God’s plans for my life were so awe-inspiring and greater than I ever could imagine that I could fully and honestly give it all to Him?
Could I release my plans and let Him rewrite my story?
On sunny days when I didn’t have to work, I’d often ride the ferry to my favorite little waterfront towns to grab a scoop of ice cream. Introvert that I am, I adore being by myself and in my own thoughts without distraction. I’d sit on the deck of the ferryboat, above where the cars parked, and read novels or dive into my Bible. God continued working, ever so slowly, on my heart during these times of silence and rest.
Now therefore, stand and see this great thing which the LORD will do before your eyes.
1 Samuel 12:16 NKJV
How could I pray to make an impact on the world, yet not search for God’s deepest desire for me?
Sure, I could do great things for furthering God’s kingdom here on earth with the life I had planned out for myself. Mighty things. And I may have, but it wasn’t about that. There was nothing wrong in what I was dreaming to do—the problem lay in the fact that I made my decision for Him, without it actually occurring to me to consult Him in the matter.
Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.
Proverbs 19:21 NIV
Finally, one day as I sat on my favorite wooden park bench looking out over the Space Needle, the ferryboats dreamily floating from downtown Seattle to the San Juan Islands caught my eye. The dichotomy of the hustle of the city and the smooth, serene journey of the boat spoke to me. Which life am I after? I thought. I knew there had to be more than the hustle of life I was planning for myself.
Oh Lord, how I want to make an impact in the world for You that outlives myself, I prayed.
That day, while looking out at the sparkle of the sun upon the waves as ferryboats cut through the choppy waters, I basked in my surroundings. Listening first only to the sound of seagulls and the hubbub of a thriving city below, the words more and bigger flooded back into my mind. I heard God’s still, small voice, not because He had started talking, but because I had slowed down enough to listen.
Exhaling slowly, I closed my eyes and opened my hands.
“Send me.”
I whispered those words into the crisp Seattle air. To where? I had no idea. To do what? I was not yet told. But I knew it must begin with faith and trust. I liked the idea of trusting God and had placed my hope in Him since I was small, but this was different. This was intangible and big and weighty.
I didn’t wake up the next morning knowing God was going to flip my life upside down in the best way possible, but little by little, Christ began shifting my priorities and allowing me to dream a little bigger. And then bigger still. Somehow, I became comfortable with being very uncomfortable. I no longer lived a life of safety, nor did I have life all figured out. In fact, as I began to embrace uncertainty and mystery and discomfort, my relationship with my heavenly Father intensified and engulfed me in an all-out fire. Lack of safety and joy somehow went hand in hand as I had begun to say yes to Him, giving God control of more than just the little things in my life.
Don’t get me wrong, I was scared to death. I still am. But over and over, God has opened my eyes and heart to evidence in the Bible of other ordinary people who have also told Him, Yes and Send me to prove I’m not alone in my fear and reluctance. Even when things seem simply too big for little ol’ me.
We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence…. We need silence to be able to touch souls.
Mother Teresa
We need to add in a time of silence and softness to balance our spirit as the noise of life consumes. Driving with the radio turned off, silencing my phone, and refraining from clicking on the television for background noise are things I do now that my life is bustling and loud. But whether your current season of life feels chaotic or simple, know it is during times of quiet that we can hear God speak.
Fight against the idea that multitasking every moment of every day is how we grow best. Admittedly, I often have Audible reading a book to me while I go about daily tasks. I feel like I’m really getting things done if I can clean the house while Priscilla Shirer reads Fervent to me. I love learning about things while doing the mundane tasks of life. Doing laundry while learning about the armor of God or cleaning the bathrooms while learning to pray with the power of Christ helps keeps my mind active. It’s good, yes. It’s even excellent. But it shouldn’t be constant.
There is so much to be learned as we remove distractions and simply spend time in solitude with Christ. We learn first what we think of ourselves, whether we’re comfortable with who we are or not. Or perhaps we’re reminded of the ugliness and imperfections we try to drone out with the blaring of life. It also allows Him to talk to us. To speak to our hearts. Imagine being alone with God. No distraction of radio or television. No agenda. Just being together. Does the idea of this make you anxious? Or does it appeal to you? If it makes you squirm in your seat as you wipe sweaty palms onto your jeans, pray that God would reveal to you why it makes you uncomfortable. Maybe He’s trying to get your attention and wanting you to work through some things.
If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The Bible tells the life story of Moses, a founding father, so to say, of the lineage of Christ. Moses brought the Israelites out of Egypt, only to realize Pharaoh had changed his mind and was now chasing the former slaves and filling the horizon with Egyptian chariots and their drivers. The Hebrew people looked before them and saw nothing but a massive expanse of water in the way of their freedom. The Red Sea is far more ocean-seeming than a stream river or lake. This incredible body of water is roughly 170,000 miles long, 220 miles wide, and at its maximum depth, 7,254 feet.2 When I grew up hearing the story of God parting the Red Sea, it never occurred to me that it is as massive as it actually was at the time Moses and the Israelites walked up to its shores.
Do you know what Moses told the Israelites when they grew angry at both God and Moses for bringing them to this place of supposed slaughter? Exodus 14:14 (NIV) says Moses reminded them, “The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.”
The Lord will fight for you.
You need only to be still.
Today’s society teaches us it’s counterproductive to be still. But this verse reminds us how untrue that can be—we are not wasting time; we’re being fought for. The Hebrew word for “will fight” that is used in this verse is lacham, which also means “to wage war, to engage in battle, to overcome, and prevail.”3 I take this to say that when we’re silent and still before the Lord, Satan tries to whisper in our ear and attempts to remind us of our inadequacies, our mistakes, our failures. And if he can’t get us that way, he will force our minds to swirl with all the tasks of life: to-do lists, tasks for work, things with the family, an ever-constant stream of activities we need to remember or accomplish.
That’s why God lochem (presently fights) for us. He’s fighting off and waging war against Satan’s attacks on our minds because being distracted will keep us from hearing Him. But remember, lacham also translates to overcome and prevail. We need to continue praying in this time of silence, be consistent in our time of prayer, and wait patiently for Him to impress something onto our hearts, for Him to speak. Even when we’re standing before something as daunting and frightening as the Red Sea, in a time when we feel we need to act or react, we need first to be still.
Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him … Psalm 37:7 NIV
When I was in middle school, my parents must have breathed a prayer to the Lord similar to the one I did decades later because suddenly our belongings were packed into storage and we found ourselves living in Guatemala.
We hadn’t moved as missionaries, and though we’d first visited this beautiful country as part of a medical team, my dad wasn’t a doctor. A businessman and entrepreneur, he was part owner of a company called Glasair, which manufactures small planes. The calling Christ had put upon his heart was to provide jobs for a deeply hurting economy in desperate need of growth. So, though we weren’t sent by a church, this was most certainly my dad’s mission field. He, too, desired for the Lord to use him for something that outlived himself.
The dreams and purpose put into the hearts of my parents would only make a small impact on the crisis of poverty and unemployment rate worldwide, sure. Did that mean they were not doing enough? No! Every single person touched by their love and care was changed as they saw Jesus in and through each of us.
We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.
Mother Teresa
My parents were like candles in a dark room. Their love of Christ lit the wick of every person they touched, and as new wicks ignited, they in turn brought light to those around them: friends, family, communities. Only God knows how bright and shimmering the light in that room now radiates!
“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.”
Matthew 5:15 NIV
We spent the first six months in a quaint little town called Antigua, which was full of cobblestoned streets and bougainvillea spiraling itself atop high white walls. Women in native dress spread out their wares to sell, and children in matching school uniforms ran around while slurping Coca-Cola through a straw, holding the sandwich bag turned soda container tight so it didn’t pour out and onto the dusty ground.
Erik and I shared a room in our tiny two-bedroom cottage. His side of the wooden-walled space was full of LEGO bricks and Micro Machines; mine was plastered with posters of Candace Cameron and a baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio from his Growing Pains days. Through the windows, we could practically reach out and pick fresh avocados and some sort of lemon-lime hybrid. We’d picnic in the front yard on lush green grass, frogs jumping around us.
It was an idyllic few months, yet I often felt lonely having been ripped from sixth grade halfway through the year. Apprehension of moving to a new country whose people spoke a foreign language at a time of life when I already felt awkward waned as the single mom in the cottage next to ours befriended me. Seeing a lonely girl who had yet to find friends, she taught me to paint beautiful pansies and the Guatemalan national flower, orchids, onto fabric that she sewed into tablecloths and runners. She encouraged me to keep trying when my flowers bore evidence that they were done by the hand of a child while I swooned over hers. Her English was excellent, and she’d quiz my Spanish tenses while explaining the use of different brushes and how simple flicks of the wrist turned acrylic paint into petals, stems, and leaves.
Erik and my favorite place to play was in the ruins of an old cathedral that had been destroyed in a massive earthquake in 1773. Yet through that devastation and several more that shook the country in the two hundred years that followed, our cathedral remained, and we’d happily clamber atop the crumbling portico, long since collapsed. We’d duck under the signs that said ¡Prohibido El Paso! and pretend we didn’t read enough Spanish to know what the Do Not Enter sign meant. I’m sure many a tourist caught their breath watching us jump across the apse, high above their heads. But to us, the town was our playground.
One day while a Guatemalan friend was watching us so my mom could go to the market without little ones underfoot, Erik and I played yet again at this favorite cathedral. Climbing places we shouldn’t have been, as we often did, my brother jumped across a section and realized, too late, that the shrubbery he was leaping onto had grown atop itself and there was no ground beneath his feet. I caught his hand just in time, grunting and sweating as I pulled him back up, knowing the massive fall would likely break his body … or worse. Somehow that little scare didn’t stop us from our favorite pastime as we pinkie-promised not to tell Mom and Dad and continued in our exploration, wanting nothing more than to be the adventurers we saw in our mind’s eye.
Dad had his own daily adventure as he had to take the hour’s drive to the capital, Guatemala City, every day to set up business. So down the mountainside he went, surrounded by the bold and colorfully painted buses loaded high with produce, goods, people, and even livestock. We always watched them go by in wonder that this was real life, that these ancient school buses turned public transportation carried so many people that they literally dangled from every side of the vehicle. And somehow they lived to ride again the next day.
With Dad in la Ciudad (Guatemala City) during the week, the rest of us remained in Antigua for classes. In an effort to learn Spanish quickly, my mom, Erik, and I took those same colorful buses—complete with chickens roaming the aisles and boxes roped high up top—to language school. We spent our weekdays outside in a garden on the grounds of the Lutheran Center, squeezed into small wooden desks and surrounded by the songs of tropical birds and the sight of brilliantly colored flowers that seemed to spring up overnight.
After those six months in Antigua, my dad found and remodeled the perfect space that wouldn’t require any more commute. After papers were signed for a white cinder block and curved steel-roofed hangar at La Aurora International Airport, the factory had a new home … and so did our family. As strange as it sounds, if you ever fly into Guatemala City, you will taxi by my old home.
The windows of our second-floor bedrooms looked down to the manufacturing plant, and the smell of resin still floods my mind with long-forgotten memories. Across a small street in front of our hangar was the Guatemalan Army base, and the international runway served as our backyard.
We went to school at the Christian Academy of Guatemala (CAG), which was one of the two English-speaking schools in the city and was largely filled with missionary kids. But we also met and became friends with children whose parents worked in the embassy, and others, like us, whose parents were there for business. Since there were no school buses, several families who lived near us in Zona 13 chipped in and hired a driver, a very kind and patient man. It sounds way more glamorous than it was, and we often rode with the windows open because eight or more of us piled into the tin can of a van without air-conditioning made for lots of sweating and stinking. Suspension was another thing our van seemed to be without, and we bumpily rode over potholes and cracked pavement to and from school.
It wasn’t until years later that I found out he was actually our bodyguard.
This was the mid-1990s, and it was a time of great suffering for Guatemala, economically and politically. While we lived there, two coup d’états occurred that violently and illegally overthrew the government. We felt personally tied to these events since the president who was ultimately overthrown had cut the ribbon at my dad’s company’s grand opening ceremony.
As a child, I couldn’t fully understand the gravity of how we lived and what we experienced. Looking back now, I believe God shielded Erik and me from grasping the magnitude of all that we saw. And we saw truly terrible things. Guerillas were a very real threat, so machine gun—carrying guards were posted outside the entrance of our church. All of the church ushers hid firearms under their suit jackets too. Just in case.
It’s hard to wrap your head around how we were able to live among all of the violence and instability. And this may sound very strange if you’ve never lived in such an environment, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. Or rather, it was a huge deal, but it was something you just learned to live with. You were careful, took precautions, and completely trusted in God to keep your family safe, praying for Him to tell you when enough was enough and it was time to leave.
When we did leave, we left quickly, leaving behind most of our possessions. I’m not even sure what happened to our cats or that massive blue-painted hand-carved table in our kitchen. We carried just a suitcase full of clothes and a handful of precious items. We said only a few good-byes.
I thought we had fled the country because of devastation guerillas wreaked in our little community. But years later, my parents told us that, in fact, we left because there was a hit out on my dad.
Even before living in Central America, my parents began infusing a love of our world into Erik and my lives. We would eat at restaurants that served Thai, Indian, or Scandinavian cuisine. They brought friends into our lives who were from all over the world. And though we weren’t able to trot across the globe physically, we often had tickets for an event at the Seattle Opera house called World Cavalcade.
I loved these special evenings at World Cavalcade because not only did I get to dress up and stay out late, but a screen was put in place in the middle of the elegant and gilded stage that usually housed ballets and operas. These narrated travel films from around the world presented me with life and cultures I fell in love with. Sitting in the velvet seats of the opera house, we would travel across the world to India, Egypt, Brazil, and Italy. We’d view life in England or cities throughout the Holy Land. During intermission as we sipped sparkling cider and hot chocolate, Erik and I would try out these new languages that felt funny on our tongues, exploding in laughter at the annoyed glances we’d receive from older, regal-looking men and women in their furs and suits.
I wouldn’t recognize until years later that these experiences as a child helped prepare me for the day I released my plans back to God while sitting on that wooden park bench. The international life I planned for myself would be repurposed into a life that would reach much further, have a greater impact, and become much more beneficial because He was in control rather than me.
I used to think I had to act a certain way to follow God, but now I know God doesn’t want us to be typical.
Bob Goff4