Moses' Attitude

Moses' Attitude

This is assured to be one of my less funny and less happy blog posts. And I've written about near apocalypses.

Anyway, I've been in Korea for two months now. I was supposed to be going home a week from now. But I'm not.

Nope, now I'm here until December. I'll be home just in time for Christmas. I turned in my recently signed extension contract and dropped my classes with my university- so I am well past the point of no return.

The kicker is this was incredibly hard for me to do. I didn't really want to do it.

To be wholly honest, the past two months have been the hardest I've faced in recent memory. Not because of Korea, not at all. I enjoy teaching here and living here isn't so bad.

But while I've been here I have had to deal with the loss of something indescribably important to me. And it's left me hollow inside. I mean, I have dreams in my life---and this is the one that has mattered more than any other. There are things I'd like to do in life, and there are things I have to do. This is the one thing I have to do, the thing I feel God has put me on this Earth to do.

To use metaphors, right now I'm feeling like a pilot who will never fly- like a chef who will never step foot in a kitchen- like a fire fighter who can't stop his house from burning down.

I know the situation isn't as hopeless as that, but it sure feels that way.

And while my apparent loss by no means precludes my dream of coming true, it makes things incredibly uncertain. I no longer know what to do in order to make it come true.

To use another metaphor, if I was a man lost in a forest, and my one and only dream was to find the path that would lead me out, I've been running down different paths and finding dead ends for a long time now.

But I found one path that looked like it could be the way out- and I'd been walking down it for a long time, seeing sign after sign that seemed to say that the path I was on would take me out of the forest, enough that I truly believed I'd be getting out soon. Then suddenly this path, the best path I'd ever been on, dead-ended. So I stand alone in the forest, once again lost, and now intensely disappointed and unsure if there even IS an exit.

What does this have to with staying in Korea? Well, first of all, I do like teaching here. Korea itself has been great so far and I'm not really ready to leave it yet...but at the same time, I know I can't pursue my dream here. So I desperately (and selfishly) wanted to back home and do whatever I could to find a way to get back on making MY dreams come true. Besides, emotionally, it would be easier to be at home where my family is rather than mostly alone out here in Korea.

I mean, today was my mother's birthday, and so my parents set up the web cam and I sang Happy Birthday to her over the internet. But I had to hang up when it came time to eat cake...and for the first time since arriving here I became exceedingly homesick. I'll be missing my brother's birthday too, and for the fifth year in a row I'll be away from home on mine.

Normally this hasn't bothered me as much, but I guess with all that's gone on recently it's just hard to feel like you're 12,000 miles away from the only people who care about you.

All that said, why in the world am I still here? I don't have to be. But even though it may not really be what I want, I can say without a doubt that it is what God wants. I can see him using me here and it seems I am doing good. Lots of prayer has gone into this and that much is clear.

So I choose to be like Moses.

Moses did not want to go to Egypt, at all. When God told him to go, Moses argued with him for about a chapter and a half. After God soundly beat down every logical objection to going, and Moses couldn't think of any other thing to complain about, he was forced to cry out: "O Lord, please send someone else to do it."(Exodus 4:13)

That's an all to easy excuse to make...just let somebody else do it. But it's incredibly wrong. God didn't call someone else, he called Moses, because Moses was the right person for the job. And right now, he's calling me to stay in Korea for four more months. Who am I to argue?

Indeed, Moses probably drug his feet all the way to Egypt. But God had made it pretty clear that that was where he should be. So he went.

In this world there is right and there is wrong...and that distinction, with God's help, is not difficult to make.

I am reminded of the things I said in this blog more than a year ago. If I have to put my dream on hold, so be it. It isn't always easy to do what is right, but it is necessary. After I turned in my contract I felt good knowing that I did the right thing. Had I done otherwise, I'd probably feel a little like Jonah, except on an airplane instead of a boat.

So as hard as it was to do, I'm staying in Korea. These will be an interesting four months indeed.

“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. - Matthew 7:13