Suffering and ministry turmoil left me devastated. Jesus met me there.
The week I became a mother was the most beautiful and terrifying week of my life. On my son’s second day of life, my husband I were told that he had a rare form of jaundice, possibly caused by a congenital defect of the liver. One early morning as he was getting his blood drawn, I was shaken as I watched his tiny arms flail. Muffled by the clear incubator walls, his screams shattered my heart. All I wanted to do was hold him and take away all of his pain.
Seven years before having a child, my husband, Ryan, and I lived in a small, mostly Latino community just a few miles northwest of East Los Angeles. Neither of us would have thought that we would make East Los Angeles our home. But during an urban ministry project, our visions and plans for our lives began to shift. We were inspired by ministers and followers of Jesus who relocated from more comfortable middle- and upper-class communities into neighborhoods of poverty to live in solidarity with people who were different from them. We had the same hope and intention.
Ryan and I became part of a church-planting team in Lincoln Heights. Ryan started the high school ministry, and I started the path to becoming a physician. After some ministry mishaps and failures, the youth group began to thrive. Our youth opened their hearts and their lives to us, and we connected with them. We invited them into relationships with Jesus and did our best to nurture any spiritual hunger we encountered. We felt a sense of purpose as 20-something newlyweds who were seeking to live out what we understood of God’s calling on our lives. When it came time to move for my upcoming medical residency, it was difficult to say goodbye to this group of hungry and humble students.
After four years ...
from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/32x3n6A
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