About a month ago, I was transformed. To give you a visual, think of that beat up yellow Camaro that becomes a fast, strong, and adorable Autobot named Bumblebee. He is always an Autobot, but hidden by a rough untamed exterior. He appeared to be a mundane rundown vehicle, but boy did he prove the world wrong! His true self was projected when he would walk instead of roll. Love that Bumblebee.
Bumblebee and me… I bet you don’t think we have that much in common. No, I’m not an Autobot, although that would be a sweet revelation. I do find that, minus being a Transformer, I can relate to Bumblebee’s double life. A lot of the time, I feel like I am that Camaro. Beat up, mundane, untamed. I go through times that feel repetitive and meaningless. Usually those are the times that I am reflecting on my own shortcomings and can’t seem to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Even though, since I became a Christian, I have been made new in Christ, I sometimes revert back to my old ways of thinking. Romans 7:19-20 describes it well when it says, “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”
My transformation came as a result of a decision that I made. Four about 3 months I waited for an answer from God. An answer about my future. I was a Camaro for 3 months. God was knocking and I was opening the door enough for him to squeeze his face in the crack to tell me that kids need to know Jesus in Kigali. “Well, yeah!” was my obvious response, “but what more should I do?” was my constant question. I continued to keep that door only slightly ajar because I thought I had already come up with the solution on my own. God surely would agree with me. I mean it was a great plan! I could continue teaching art at KICS and just go on part-time Young Life staff. Brilliant! God uses many different tactics to show us that great plans aren’t necessarily divine plans. For me, it took 3 months of discouragement toward my “great plan” for me to see that his divine plan would be… well, divine! I was set against his divine plan for 3 reasons.
1) It would require me to raise a lot of money and that was intimidating.
2) It would require me to leave Rwanda for 6 months and live in the States and that was uncomfortable.
3) It would require me to give up teaching art and that was sad.
But alas, in the grand scheme of things, God’s plan won my heart. “What is God’s divine plan for me?” you might be asking. To go on full-time International Young Life staff in Kigali, Rwanda :) After I opened up that door wide enough for him to step through it to reveal his best plan for my life, God rewarded me by giving me unbelievable peace about all those things I was earlier apprehensive about. Now a different journey begins as I am striving to become more like Bumblebee, the Autobot. In that aspiration, the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit is they only way that I can come any closer to being the Micki that would be equivalent to the Camaro’s Autobot. Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, I never have to be that Camaro again. Paul says it well when he proclaimed, “Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord.” Romans 7:24-25
