I love myself

Lately hailey has a new thing that she does. Every once in a whiles he will start looking around the table at dinner or the living room when we are all together in the evenings and she starts on one end and makes her way around telling us who she loves. I love mommy! I love Daddy! I love Hannah! This all is very cute and sweet. But the last part is where i get struck with the voice of jesus. Because then she points to herself and she says, I love her! Basically, I love myself!! I'm not sure there is a greater gift that hailey could ever give me then when she looks at herself and says, I love myself. And it is more than just a kind of encouragement and peace in my heart that she will have good self esteem when she is older. But is this special kind of worship that I hear from the voice of my smallest child passing through my heart saying Jesus, "you have made hailey well. Jesus I love the way you made me!" In Africa Hailey couldn't be more different than everyone else here. Every child, every adult, every person looks nothing like her. She doesn't talk like they talk, she doesn't dance like they do, she doesn't dress like anyone around her. Even amidst all of the ways she sticks out like a sore thumb, still she points at herself and says, "I love her." So I see this and start to look at my own life and ministry. I look at the ways I look at evangelism and missions and somewhere along the lines I got the impression that I have to be an African to minister to Africans. And to start to be a Tanzanian I have to stop being an American. So I start doing silly things like hating the American in me. I start trying to push out the western values that have framed my personality and trying to mold myself after an eastern perspective. "why on earth do I need to save for retirement? God will provide for me! Why am I so strict about time? It really doesn't matter if I or the people around me are late. I need to stop thinking of myself as an individual and identify with the whole." But Hailey reminds me that God made me on purpose! And there is power the things He put in me. I don't have to become an African to show African that Jesus loves them. Jesus came to earth and put on skin in an incarnational step to reach us. He came to earth to show us that He loves us but he never stopped being God. He never forsook the power of being who He was. As we approach our ministries we don't need to become teenagers to minister to them. We don't need to become poor to minister to them. We will never literally wear someone else's shoes, but that doesn't mean we can't love them in the individual shoes that they wear. Jesus did a good job when he made me and he did a good job when he made each person in Africa. I worship Jesus because he made me and my job here is to help other people here to worship him because of the way he made them. I love me.