Serve.

I will admit, my first few months on the ship in Benin were a huge time of adjustment: adjusting to ship life, meeting new people, and above all, wrapping my head around how to apply what I had spent the last 4 years learning in school and actually teach a classroom of children. On top of this task, the Academy is going through an accreditation process with ACSI (Association of Christian Schools International) which requires more paperwork, meetings and well….just time.

Honestly, my expectations of working on the Africa Mercy were wonderful…but a little unrealistic. I imagined myself teaching during the day and then having the opportunity to go out and serve the people of West Africa in my free time. I wanted to get involved with every ministry and visit the hospital patients daily. I wanted to build relationships with the local people and really begin to understand a day in the life of someone from Benin (and now Togo). Like I said, wonderful expectations! After spending countless hours on weekends and evenings in my classroom, frustrated that I wasn’t getting the opportunity to SERVE as much as I had wanted to, God began to show me what it really means to serve. He really began to teach me what it means to be a part of the ‘Body of Christ’.

In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we're talking about is Christ's body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn't amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ's body, let's just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren't.
Romans 12:4-6, The Message


I realized that my first and foremost purpose in being on board the Africa Mercy, was to teach. I began to have a peace that by ‘being what I was made to be’ and doing what I was called to do, that I really WAS serving the poor of West Africa. God wasn’t expecting me to do my ‘job’ and THEN start serving after hours…but instead He was expecting me to serve Him by doing by best at what He called me to do.

The beautiful thing about this realization was that it somehow gave me greater purpose. And in feeling a deeper purpose, I began to have more passion and energy. God has begun to open up opportunities to actually use the additional passion and energy to get involved with the local people and join land-based ministries. He is showing me how to have balance to do both now.

With his strength. In His timing. With the passion He places in my heart.