It’s so hard to believe that our time here is almost up. We have been here for almost 4 weeks of camp, and we’ve watched hundreds of kids give their lives to Christ. It’s the most amazing thing to see kids experience the Lord for the first time and then decide to give their lives to him. Proem is making a huge impact in the lives of these kids, helping them explore the beauty of God’s love, grace and hope. And I’m so honored to be serving alongside such an awesome team, serving an even more awesome God! The cool thing about missions trips is you go to serve people and in the process of doing that you end up learning a lot about God and about yourself. This past school year I struggled with my faith deeply. I started out the year with a hot faith, on fire for God. Somewhere along the way that hot faith turned lukewarm. I went through a phase where I didn’t know if I was really sure that God existed at all, and I began questioning everything that I had always believed. I felt a dark cloud following me everywhere I went, although none of the people around me would have noticed anything was different at all. My faith went from hot… to lukewarm… to freezing cold. From the outside, I was a seemingly “normal” Christian. Attending church regularly, serving, even planning to intern in Poland for the second time. But what people couldn’t see was the doubt and disbelief in my heart, and how this was keeping me from the true joy and hope that we can only find in God. I left America with little faith. But as the time in Poland has started to pass, God has softened my heart. I was stuck in this mindset that I couldn’t return to God until I had fixed myself. I thought I couldn’t come back to God until I had it all together. Fortunately, that’s not at all how it works. All I had to do to return to God, was simply return to Him. I started to pray again, and I started to see the “big picture” of it all. I was finally reminded why I came on this trip in the first place. I saw the truth, the truth that has always been there. There’s a line that I really like in a Hillsong United song. It goes, “I found my life when I laid it down, I touched the sky when my knees hit the ground.” That’s what I had to do, lay it all down. I confessed my sin to God, giving up my pride, my false sense of identity, my selfish and earthly desires, my excuses, my everything. In giving those things up, I gained peace in Jesus. Since I have gained that peace, I have been able to fully focus on God and all the incredible things He is doing over here. Because let me tell you, He is moving here everyday. And it’s so cool to think that the same God that is radically changing these Polish students’ lives also knows me by name.
– Anna Osborne
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