be Holy, as I am Holy

For the
past 2 weeks, our team has been at the Gateway (the long-term AIM base here
that hosts short- term trips) prepping for and leading a group of 250 high
schoolers from Marietta
(of all places!) on their spring break trip.
Leading this trip was the undoubtedly the most exhausting thing I’ve
done in Mexico, but it was just such a cool opportunity to rely completely on
what the Lord was doing through me and in the hearts of these high
schoolers. There was so much of the
unknown going into the week- all of our FYM team had various leadership
positions in which we had no experience (I was the ministry coordinator for one
of the sites, and most of us served as ministry coaches/ translators/ cultural
trainers, etc)- but as we made ourselves available to whatever God had for us,
He just exalted Himself and we got to be in the privileged positions of
watching how He was growing and refining some of these students. It was incredible.

One of the
coolest things for me about this week was that as I tried to instill in the
students a love for the Mexican people, I realized how much God has made my
heart so soft towards their culture specifically. I think that in many instances, short term
mission trips do more for the participants than for the people. This was a frustrating realization, and this
sounds really harsh, but I’m going to be really honest here (what else are
blogs for?) Without having some cultural
training, there were some things that the students would say/ do that I just
didn’t want the Mexicans to hear/ see.
Or I just had to pray that they had the grace to see that these students
were still really young. In praying
about this, God reminded me that one of the first times I really experienced
him in a powerful way was when I went with Young Life to build a house in Tijuana, Mexico. I’m sure I did some really ignorant things
while I was there and seemed super insensitive to their culture, but that was
my first out-of-the country missions experience, and He used that to built a
foundation in my life for seeking more of him.
That week, I remember Allen Levi (big-time singer/songwriter in the YL world) led
worship and I guess in between one of the songs or something he said something that completely changed the way I
thought about myself as a Christian. He
said, “God doesn’t grade on a curve.”
That’s the first memory I have of realizing that being a Christian
involves a lot more than avoiding the “bad stuff” that a lot of high schoolers
get into; that it demands us to wholeheartedly seek continual refinement as our
goal is to “be holy, as I am holy” (that’s somewhere in Deuteronomy I think and
then again in 1 or 2 Peter- but I can’t find it right now!). And I’ve come a long way since that week
almost exactly seven years ago, but that doesn’t mean I’m like, slowing down or
getting close to the final goal in terms of how much work the Lord has left to
do in my heart. God calls us to this
life of following Him that’s radically different from how the world
sees goodness. I mean, how many times
did the crowds say, after Jesus’ preaching, “surely this teaching is too
difficult”. I’m just so thankful that we
can’t reach that holiness here on this side of heaven, but that instead we
spend our lifetimes pressing on toward the goal (Phil 3:14) of holiness, toward
Christ, who is the end of the law, the substance of the Gospel, and in living
life doing this, we receive his mercies anew every day, moment by moment, as we
depend on Him, the author and perfecter of our faith.