“How did I miss this?,” a recent grad asked himself in response to his time living in Southeast Asia with Cafe 1040. The question wasn’t a matter of missing a “call” to missions but missing the reality that God’s prevailing purpose from Genesis to Revelation is to bring people to Himself.
I had very little previous missions experience. I had never been through the Perspectives course and only had been on one missions trip. Could I really have gone the rest of my life never seeing the true role of the Church if I hadn’t come here?
It’s here I made friends who live lives and have pasts that I can’t fully understand or relate to, too few of whom are my brothers and sisters in Christ –adopted children of God.
I learned that God is telling the world a story that began before time. That’s a story with a global setting and eternity to gain or lose.
This is why Cafe 1040 exists. We desire for this generation to encounter the heart of God and live their lives in response to that. The goal is obedience to what God has placed in each of our hearts, not necessarily overseas missions.
My Cafe 1040 experience helped me see that there is obedience to live out no matter who I am, what my training/experience has been, or what the future may hold. God has blessed us all and is big enough to let obedience and faithfulness be something we do everywhere and every day, and I’m overjoyed to have a perspective that helps me try to live like that and share that joy.
When we experience the heart of God, we realize that our lives are simply a piece of His story. We all have a part to play and it looks different for each one of us. Our role in this story is to ask, “How can God use my life to spread His glory?”
