Last Sunday we were able to sit and talk with Echo VanderWal, one of the founders of The Luke Commission. I asked her, looking back at all it took to get where they are today, what her advice would be for us as college students. She told us to move where God moves, to have active faith that He will provide, and not to be afraid to fail. This meant a lot to all of us, but I think it meant so much because we had experienced what doing all of those things looked like through TLC.
I’m not going to lie, these last few weeks were really hard work. They were long days and heavy lifting. We had multiple setbacks, faced heavy tension from home, and quite a bit of pressure to fit in to a new place. However, the biggest setback was our tight grip. There are some things in life that we can adapt to easily, and this trip was not one of them.
I’m sure when we get home, we will tell our families how amazing our experience was. There were a lot of tears when we had to leave our new Swazi family. We experienced a body of believers that was actually structured like the church of the gospel, a people devoted to working hard for the Lord, and a people who had pure hearts. We lived under a “no gossip” policy- gossip being defined as anything that you tell someone else that they couldn’t do something about. Therefore, frustration, bitterness, and complaints were kept to ourselves.
Our experiences were great, however, when we sat around the table and discussed what really stuck, it wasn’t how big the elephants were, or how yummy our family breakfast was. What moved us was the byproduct of having open hands. We were softened, shaped, and stretched by someone who is powerful enough to do so.
