English has always come easy for me. I have ALWAYS been a talker. I’m a social person, so to be social, you have to talk, but little did I know that one day, God would call me to sacrifice that gift.
No, He didn’t ask me to become a mute. 🤣 HE makes the dumb speak.☝️
But He did ask me to be willing to sacrifice my native language, not just English, but Texan. (If you’ve ever lived in rural Texas, you will get this statement. 😂 …Southern drawls, Texas twang, our own redneck idioms, throw in a little banjo, and well, you get the idea.)
Years ago, God asked me to sacrifice my native tongue for the Russian language, and He sent me to Russia and Ukraine, and before I was even married, God led me to do incredible things because I was willing to sacrifice what I saw as my greatest strength, and God gave me the gift of learning Russian. I wasn’t perfect, and I certainly didn’t speak Russian like I speak Texan😁, but I was doing it. I was getting around, purchasing things by myself, and I was even able to minister to people in Russian. It is as if God unlocked a whole new door for me to walk through for His Kingdom, and I fell in love with the people there, and I am still in contact with many of them today.
And then He sent us back to the States, to WAY RURAL Texas. It was so RURAL that even I had to learn a new level of speaking Texan😉, and I fell in love with the people there.
And then God led us to New Mexico, and I had to learn an entirely new culture and environment. I had to learn to speak without my twang again, and I learned lots more Spanish than I’d ever known prior, but I was doing it, and I fell in love with the people there.
And then God called us back to small-town Texas, and I recalled my childhood idioms and my childhood accent. I saw friends I hadn’t seen since elementary school, and the Lord allowed me a time to once again minister in my true native tongue, and I fell in love with the people there all over again.
And then God said, “Misty, what do you think is the greatest gift I’ve given you?”
“Communication,” I quickly responded. “I think I’ve been able to help a lot of people come to you and understand Your Word, helped people work out marital problems, and helped people struggling with depression and addictions. I’ve spoken in churches and preached at women’s conventions, helping people understand your overwhelming love for them, your will for their lives, and your message of the cross…and all because you’ve blessed me with the ability to communicate so effectively and sincerely.”
God then stopped me from my bragging about what all I’ve done for Him😜. “Would you be willing to sacrifice that for me?” He asked.
“What? Sacrifice what?”
I sat back in my chair for a moment when the realization finally hit of the immense sacrifice God was asking me to make. You see, I thought I understood what the rest of my life was supposed to look like. God had brought us full circle, and we were supposed to finish up the rest of our lives working at this church speaking my native tongue, weren’t we? But now, am I hearing God correctly–in my late forties, God was asking me to start over? Are you kidding me? I’m not blind, and so, I can see that I have less life in front of me than I’ve got behind me, and yet God is asking me to start from scratch?😳
This is where you pray hard because you don’t want to make a single mistake. You don’t want to mis-hear God, so I sought God–for DAYS. No, there was no way around it: “Are you willing to sacrifice the gift I’ve given you to follow Me?”
A war happened within my heart because I have worked my whole life to make the friends I have. I’ve studied their heart-language and their culture because I wanted to be the person that really understood them, that prayed with them, encouraged them, cried with them, laughed with them, and celebrated with them. I wanted to be that kind of minister–that kind of friend, and now, God was asking me to start over with a new country where I knew no one, a new culture of which I had no understanding, and a new language in which I cannot communicate. Was I willing to lay down what I saw as God’s greatest strength in me and say, “God I’ll follow you there without friends, without knowing what I’m doing, and without being able to speak to anyone?
Well, you all know what happened next if you’ve followed our ministry at all. If this is the first blog you’ve read of mine, then check out https://www.missionjosiah.org , but for brevity’s sake, here, I’m going to skip to this part of the story…
Guess what? It’s been three weeks since we moved to rural Romania, and I’m still struggling today to communicate simple things, like, “Do you have_____for sale?” 🤦 Yes, it’s a humbling experience–a daily battle for every word I learn in this language, and I’m not in my twenties like I was when God asked me to learn Russian, but I’m claiming this language as my own. I’ve drawn the line in the sand, and I’m not giving up.
And then, yesterday, I sat in this small room where they have started this outreach in a Romanian village. It was only a small group of people, but then they began to sing this worship song to the Lord. This was not a song translated from English. It is a Romanian worship song. Tears came to my eyes as they sang the words with such passion and sincerity to this Jesus they had only recently come to know. Prior this village had not received the message of Jesus.
I thought of how many in churches we’ve pastored have complained about this or that in the worship service. Old songs, new songs, too many fast, too many slow, I don’t like the style, I can’t worship to that song…and then I stopped, and I just listened to their voices all in one accord. I couldn’t understand anything in the song, except the title and two other lines in the song, but I heard teenage girls singing with passion, a lady who’d lost her whole family to follow Jesus, her husband who had found Jesus because of his wife’s tenacity to follow Him, and an elderly, widowed woman and man. They all lived in this very poor village. We had to drive on bumpy, curvy, dirt roads just to get there. No American would look at these people living in these conditions and feel like they had anything to praise God for, and yet they did–they PRAISED God. Not complaining about the style or lyrics, just worshipping Him together.
As the words came forth I found myself in awe of God’s compassion for people. He reaches past cultural and language barriers. He goes beyond national boundary lines. He’s not afraid to walk any dirt road. He’s not deterred by poverty or sin struggles. He doesn’t stop reaching out to people because they don’t see Him or understand Him or even know He exists at all. He loves people, and He wants everyone to know and be set free in Him, and if we are truly God’s, then we have to be willing to sacrifice His greatest gift to us, just like Abraham, and follow Him to the hard places.
Maybe He wants to use you to change the world, and just maybe, along the way, He has something for them to teach you too. Yesterday, they taught me that it’s my honor to sacrifice the greatest gift God’s given me to follow Him here, and because I’m willing to do that, He will give me back greater, so stay tuned for my Romanian language progress… because HE☝️ is ALWAYS faithful.
And guess what? As I study this language, as I take it into my heart and adopt it as my communication language, I’m falling in love with these people. This is about to become amazing, and I just can’t wait to see what all the Lord has in store. 💕
(In case you were curious ☺️.
The lines I understood from the song are below:
Abba, my Father
You are big, you are strong
Creator of the galaxies)
If you’d like to hear the full song, you can check it out on YouTube by searching-
Abba Tatul Meu
You should. It’s beautiful!❤️
HappygoMisty 