TESTIMONY

      For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Naomi and I’m now a 2^nd year at UC San Diego. And this summer I was able to go to India on a mission trip through a program called STSM (short-term summer missions) with a campus ministry called KCM (Korean-American Campus Missions.

      KCM is known for having very intensive training; 3 months of weekly Sunday trainings plus 2 full weeks of early morning prayer & intensive retreat. But I don’t think any kind of training or prep can fully prepare you for what God can potentially reveal to you on the mission field. At least that was the case for me. My team & I were well-prepared ministry-wise, but I never could’ve guessed how much God would show me & reveal to me about myself, about Himself, and about the people of India. For me, this mission trip was definitely His way of refining me & purifying my heart. I learned during training that God wants to send me to change me rather than to have me change the world. And that was where I think my mentality about the purpose of this trip began to shift. I honestly think I went into this program/process focused on myself (with good intentions, I did want to glorify God & see how He could possibly use me), but it definitely wasn’t purely for the Lord. He put me in many situations where I had to die to myself so that I could see whom I was dying for and what I was dying for. A simple situation I can share where I really had to die to myself for God was learning & performing skits for our ministry. During training, we had to learn about 10-15 skits & for me, I’ve always been uncomfortable acting in front of people. Even at church retreats, I would always try to be the narrator or a human prop like a tree because I felt so awkward & uncomfortable acting. It may seem miniscule & silly, but it was something I really had to just lift up to God. I realized that I was letting my insecurities & selfish desires get in the way of how God wanted to use me, & in this case it was through skits that conveyed the beauty that is the gospel. Over time, with the mentality that I wasn’t doing this for myself or anyone else but the Lord, I was able to be so blessed by doing these skits in training & in India because God revealed to me the beauty of His unconditional love for us that was made tangible & understandable through what he did for us on that cross & the sheer magnitude of it, which I still can’t wrap my mind around. Being shown these things made me recognize the urgency of the gospel & how important it is to share it with people of all nations. So many people in this world are living without God, some by choice & many because they’ve never even heard of Christianity, or faith, or our God. This really resonated with me because I never genuinely felt this way about the gospel & never wanted to share the love of God so enthusiastically before. It may have been due to the extreme circumstances I was in & whatnot, but I think God was really working in my heart to show me that I need the Lord just as much as the people of India & the rest of the world.

      Truthfully, I don’t think I ever relied on Him as much as I did in India - physically, emotionally, mentally, & spiritually. There’s one specific moment I remember where God broke me in an unexpected way that really taught me what it meant to fully rely on the Lord. The first instance was in Andhra Pradesh, a state of India, where we had our first leg of ministry. I have a bad back (even in my young age) & all of a sudden it started acting up to the point where I couldn’t do much but lay down. I couldn’t stand or even sit up to eat dinner so while my team was doing all of these, I was there on the side lying down by myself. And that was the first time by back restricted me from doing anything. I laid there feeling so vulnerable & helpless, so useless to the team that I started breaking down & I didn’t know what to do. So, in prayer, I lifted myself to the Lord and just trusted in His sovereignty that there was purpose in why I suffering. I was so caught up in trying to get things done & do God’s work, but on myself & my abilities that I think He had to physically unable me from doing it on my own to show that I need Him. In that moment, I remembered a passage someone once shared with me in a difficult time – 2 Corinthians 12:9, which says, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” I realized that in my flesh, I’m so weak & ultimately I can’t do anything for Him, especially on this mission field. He broke me (metaphorically & literally) & I felt as if He was telling me to “be still & know that He is God.” It was a very intimate moment & after my team prayed for me, amazingly, my back already felt so much better & I was able to get up & move around a little. That just showed me that trusting in God could do so much.

      This leads to me one of the things that I learned that resonates with me the most. Growing up in the church & being a Christian for most of my life, there’s one thing I heard very often – “God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good.” We say it in during praise, to children during VBS, we even said it to the Indian children all the time, but for me I don’t think I fully understood the meaning nor did it mean anything significant to me. I thought it was just something we as Christians said, pretty much for the heck of it. But God completely redefined that saying for me. I realized that my love for God & the strength of my faith was so conditional. If I was happy, if things were going my way, & if I had everything I wanted in that moment, that God was good. Only then did I give thanks & glory to God, but what I learned through my sufferings in India is that in everything & anything. It’s that God is good sometimes or once in awhile, but there was a reason why we said “ALL the time.” Even when things were difficult & I wanted to give up & go home, I remembered a verse I kept close to my heart during the trip – Romans 8:18, which says, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” My struggles & sufferings may have seemed so magnified & dramatic & painful at the time, but I had to step back & see that in the big scheme of things, they were nothing compared to the things that God was going to show me through them. And even if God strips everything away & I mean everything (like Job everything), I can find joy & I can absolutely delight in the Lord because ultimately, I have grace. I have His unconditional, beautiful & purifying grace & love.