Sarah is a student at Biola University and was part of the Uganda team this past summer.
There’s no specific event that happened on my missions trip that I can center my testimony around. But rather, I think my testimony revolves around the realization of what a skewed perspective of missions I had. Prior to this mission trip to Uganda, my fellow KCM friends who had gone on STSM before were all hyping up the idea of applying for KCM STSM and raving about how amazing it will be to experience God moving every single day. I began to think that every day I would wake up and experience God and that his work would be so evident to us. That our ministry would be powerful, our conversations would be God-centered, and people would be accepting Jesus Christ left and right. But arriving in Uganda and going through our first day of ministry I experienced that that was not the case at all.
Before leaving on the plane, my brother had written me an encouragement letter that included a bible verse that came from Jeremiah 29:13, which says “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart”. At first, these words just glossed over my mind and I didn’t think much of it. But every night I came back to this verse and meditated on these words and asked myself what it meant to truly “seek God” because I thought I was doing that all along.
I realized that just because we were in a third world country doesn’t mean that God is going to be working more than he is already working back at home in California. This God that is working in the people of Uganda is the same God that is working through my life and the lives of everyone else around me back at home. When it was difficult to see God working through my mission trip, I finally found what it meant to truly seek him with all my heart. Being a Christian means that we need to be attentive, prayerful, and seek God in every circumstance. And once I began to do that, my eyes were opened to see the ways in which God was at work not only on my team but also in our ministry and the people that we had met in Uganda.
Learning to “seek God with all my heart” is the main thing I learned from this mission trip. Although God has the ability to reveal himself to us even when we are not looking for Him, I was challenged to have a heart that is constantly seeking God that was necessary not only for the mission trip but more importantly for my mission back at home. I understand now what it means to seek God and find him in every circumstance and to lean into him in every situation.
