A Beautiful Christmas

Tonight was the long awaited and much anticipated Bridge Youth Center and Youth Emergency Shelter combined Christmas dinner.

Through the generosity of many many people we were able to pull off an amazing night of food, fellowship, and fun! The youth shelter has a section for families as well and so we had whole families come and eat the food that 2 ladies so wonderfully made for us. It was an incredible feeling to sit on the couches at the front of the center and look over everyone having fun, eating great good and serving them. I felt an all too familiar feeling. And feeling that feeling got me feeling weird.

Let me explain.

There's this feeling I got in UG all the time. My fellow UG lovers will be able to understand and I'm sure you can plug ET lovers, LB lovers, GH lovers etc in there.

I got this feeling when I was riding a boda boda home from watching a football match with friends in town while carrying Chloe around with me too. I got this feeling in church, basically every week in UG. I got it at every bible study (each of the gazillion ones we went to every week). I got it while watching Soph sleep on my bed in the afternoon while I read and journaled. I got it all Christmas day last year.

It's that awesome feeling of knowing your in the exact spot the Lord wants you in. It's the feeling of total contentment and peace. As i looked at the youth, volunteers, staff, and families, I thought how PROUD i was to serve this AMAZING God who orchestrates these nights and allows ME the privilege of serving him while doing something that I've come to love love love.

Here's the scary part: If I'm feeling that feeling here, in Canada...where does that leave my feelings I had in UG. The really scary part is that I'm NOT going to Ghana anymore. I feel like there is something here for me, that God's got all figured out, and I just need to wait and see it all unfold before me, in His timing. I was talking to a staff at the Bridge tonight about Ghana and I told him how i felt like this is what i should do because its 'what i do'. I go to Africa. Any chance i get. Now all of a sudden I'm not jumping at that chance...I used to say that i was definitely, one billion percent going to live out the rest of my days in a mud hut. Then i cut that down to 5-10 years. Now I heard about this clinic in downtown Toronto that is specifically for the poor who have no health cards, no insurance, etc and it got me thinking about how SWEET it would be to work there. It's freaking me out.

There's a girl who comes to almost every drop in night and we've gotten to be good friends. It was beautiful watching her tonight just be. Not worrying about where she's staying that night, about all the crap in her life (there's way too much), about school. She was happy, with this peaceful look on her face like from 5 to 11 tonight, she was a 16 year old with loving loving loving parents in a stable healthy, happy, functional family, where her biggest problem was deciding whether she wanted to get killed by me at fooseball again.


1 Peter 4:10-11 "God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies. Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ. All glory and power to him forever and ever! Amen.