Giving God My First Fruits

The Lord has been so good to me even just in the first few weeks of being overseas! He’s teaching me so much about my purpose in Him, and I just have to share it with you all! I feel like this update is unusually long, so buckle up! 🙃

Also the firework photo is from when we went to Jovel’s house for dinner. He’s one of the church members, and he fed us a great meal and we worshipped together there.

Ministry

I’ll start off with a brief update on how our teaching ministry is going. Alleah and I are still teaching the same three brothers, but we’ve added Bella to our teaching team! She’s the other girl from Pennsylvania on my squad, and we’ve agreed that we have the same personality in different fonts. I’m so happy to get to spend more time with her in school, and she’s been very helpful making flashcards and teaching. We’re trying to teach our boys what nouns, verbs, and adjectives are. They’re doing alright with that, although I wouldn’t be shocked if they show up tomorrow having forgotten everything. Gotta love Mondays. 😅 For math, last week we taught them subtraction, and this past week we taught them multiplication. They’re doing pretty well! We’re so proud of them. I’m super excited to get to keep working with them for the next few weeks before we move on to Thailand.

What are first fruits?

For my personal Bible study, I’m following a chronological reading plan. I’m currently in Numbers, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in the books of the Law in the Old Testament recently. One of the many types of offerings that the Israelites were commanded to honor the Lord with was at the Feast of Weeks. God commanded the Israelites to bring their best before Him at the beginning of the harvest: “Also you shall keep the Feast of the Harvest for the first fruits of your labors from what you sow I the field; also the Feast of the Ingathering at the end of the year when you gather in the fruit of your labors from the field.” (Exodus 23:16) God literally asked His people to bring Him the first and the best of the harvest. He told them, “You shall bring the choice first fruits of your soil into the house of the Lord your God.” (Exodus 23:19) For the gardeners out there, imagine if you worked hard on nurturing your plants, and then you had to give up your very first ripe produce! They actually had to do that.

Giving God their best was a way of reminding the Israelites that everything they had was from the Lord. When they were given this command, they had recently been freed by God from their bondage in Egypt.

Their very freedom was given to them straight from God. They even left Egypt wealthy! “Now the sons of Israel had done according to the word of Moses, for they had requested from the Egyptians articles of silver and articles of gold, and clothing; and the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have their request. Thus they plundered the Egyptians.” (Exodus 12:35-36) Wow. Only God can make a nation like Egypt willingly hand over their valuables to the people group whose God had brought a bunch of plagues destroying their crops and generally making their lives miserable. That’s not natural, guys. Maybe out of fear, but out of favor?!?

So anyway, everything Israel had was from the Lord, and the same is true for all that God has blessed us with. Giving God our first fruits, our best, reminds us of this truth. This includes tithing, but involves much more than giving God material things.

McDonald’s first fruits

Not all of us relate to the gardening example, so I’ll share another example from this week. It was the evening after all of our ministry obligations were over, and a couple of people decided to order McDonalds for delivery. When it arrived, I went out to hang out with them. Two peopleoffered me the first bite of their McFlurry. WHAT?!? That’s actually crazy to me. Next level generosity if you ask me. If that’s not giving up your first fruits, I don’t know what is.

My first fruits

God has been revealing to me that He is worthy of my giving Him so much more of myself. First, I need to get my act together and start waking up to give Him my time before school. I’ve really been struggling to get up on time (a common theme on our squad), which means my God time has been pushed to whenever I happen to think of it and have time. God is worthy of more than that, but I should also recognize that choosing not to give Him time to fill my cup is preventing me from pouring out in ministry in the way that God intended. We are designed for relationship with Him, so I need to be pursuing Him first if I intend to respond to others and to circumstances in a healthy and godly way.

Part of the reason I came on this trip was to get direction on whether or not full time ministry is something God has for me. One of our leaders, Gretchen, talked to us last Sunday about the cost of discipleship. I didn’t take notes, but she talked about surrendering things to God. The Lord has put human trafficking victims on my heart ever since I was a teenager. Maybe last year or so, I believe that He also put the nation of India on my heart. Side note: I’ve never been to India. During the time of processing we were given after Gretchen was done sharing, God brought all of that back to mind. Previously, I had viewed all of that as a suggestion to maybe consider giving some of my life to later in the distant future. Now I believe that God is calling me to lay down my selfishness and fear and actively pursue serving Him in that way.

Two songs helped me to process giving God my whole life: “The Cost” and “Alabaster,” both by Rend Collective. Go give them a listen! I just want to share some lyrics that were meaningful to me.

Alabaster

I am broken at Your feet

Like an alabaster jar

Every piece of who I am

Laid before Your Majesty

I will bow my life at Your feet

My lips, so lost for words, will kiss Your feet

The Cost

I’m saying “yes” to You

And “no” to my desires

I’ll leave myself behind and follow You

I’ll walk the narrow road

Cause it leads me to You

I’ll fall but grace will pick me up again

I’ve counted up the cost

And You are worth it

I do not need safety as much as I need You

You’re dangerous, but Lord You’re beautiful

I’ll chase You through the pain

I’ll carry my cross

Cause real love is not afraid to bleed

Future First Fruits?!

Fast forward a couple days, I was sitting in a coffee shop working on applying for a scholarship for Cedarville. Specifically, the President’s Ministry Impact scholarship. One of the questions was essentially, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” My first thought was I have no idea. My second thought was India. So I put both. 😂 I truly cannot imagine living in the US with just a normal day job. It doesn’t fit in my imagination. So now it’s a matter of determining if God wants me to focus on the missions aspect in college or if He wants me to pursue a different major that I could use to glorify Him in a missions setting. Also, the purpose of sharing this is not to lay out all my future plans for my life. I’ve already spent seasons positive I was going to go into a STEM field or music therapy, and now I’m in Malaysia teaching kids English and sleeping on a sleeping pad with about two inches from mine to the next, so we saw how that worked out. The point is to say that God is softening my heart to serving Him with my whole life wherever He leads. Which is really scary, but also so comforting because I serve such a good and a faithful God. He has good plans for me; I just have to walk in them.

Surprise wedding?!?

The rumors turned out to be true! We found out somewhere around 11:00pm on Friday that in addition to the 7 hour seminar we attended during the day, we would be leaving around 7:30 to go to a wedding. We still didn’t even know who was getting married. On top of that, we would be dancing at said wedding. We have had only two dance rehearsals with only the girls, and we don’t know the whole dance yet, so we scrapped that idea and did the church clap at a random Christian Indian wedding.

Saturday is supposed to be our adventure day, so we’re generally not supposed to have anything planned on a Saturday. This country is not so structured, so our Thursdays and Fridays we generally have most of the day free, but there is no guarantee that our Saturday will be free. Honestly, there’s just no guarantees in general, so we just kinda roll with it. So on Saturday we woke up and went to a seven hour seminar that was mainly on prayer. It was led by a pastor from India who was involved in the Asbury revival, which I still don’t really know what that was, but no matter. Anyway, we did that. I probably could have gotten more out of it, but I’m going to be so honest that my attention span was just not there. So we finished that, and then I took a people break under a table listening to worship music for a solid two hours. It was fantastic.

I emerged from under the table to people starting to get ready for the wedding. We have all been given cultural outfits to wear to church and whatever events would require it. Mine is just the yellow shirt that was in the picture in the last blog from me singing at the Hindu festival. I’ve been just wearing it with my black cargo pants from Walmart, but that wasn’t going to cut it for the wedding, so I asked around for a skirt to borrow before finally getting a black dress from a friend that I could just wear the shirt over. So I got the dress and got changed and did my hair (no makeup because I didn’t bring any…think I was the only makeup free female on the squad last night…whelp…😐). I went downstairs to find a bunch of people going through more and fancier cultural outfits. So long story short, I ended up changing again into address that I was fairly confident was going to rip putting it on (no zippers or buttons 😬), but praise the Lord because it did not rip! We loaded up the vehicles and headed to the wedding.

We arrived, learned the names of the couple from the signs at the entrance, and were ushered to seats in the front. The seating was just the same circular tables where we ate our meal, and there was an aisle down the center of the room. The stage at the front had a bunch of decorations, the cake, and a couch thing for the bride and groom and pictures. Not long after we got there, they did the wedding ceremony, but I only really remember everyone (flower girls, bridesmaids, groomsmen, and the bride and groom together) walking/dancing down the aisle. There were no vows or ring ceremonies or anything like that that I’m aware of. They brought all the pastors in the room up to pray over them.

Afterwards, there was a hodge-podge of eating, hanging out, dance performances, and a band playing, with incredibly loud music the entire time. Honestly, we couldn’t really hold a conversation because the music was so loud you had to yell in someone’s ear to communicate with them. The bride and groom were taking pictures with different groups of people on the stage almost the whole time. We ended the night with some dancing to worship songs, but at that point there were a lot less people there and it was mostly just racers dancing. It was quite a night. It was super fun, though!

Sorry, I don’t have pictures of the wedding right now. I didn’t bring my phone. I might try to get some from a friend for the next post.