Growing up in small church congregations, I sang countless old hymns from my pew or the choir loft. A perennial favorite was “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”  The first verse recounts “what a fellowship, what a joy divine, leaning on the everlasting arms; what a blessedness, what a peace is mine, leaning on the everlasting arms.”  The refrain repeats the same theme:  “leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.”

As our life has been upended, uprooted, and unsettled these past several months, I find myself asking whether this simple declaration– leaning on the everlasting arms of God– genuinely defined my life and actions throughout decades of being a Christ-follower.  Being stripped by the Spirit has taught me how much I value self-sufficiency.  So many times I purported to lean on God when in reality, I leaned on my own abilities and resources.  Even while thanking God for His gifts, I subconsciously thought it was all about me, for me, and by me.

Nine months ago when we began raising support for our ministry, it was painfully difficult to approach friends, family, and acquaintances to ask for funding.  Until that point, we both had lucrative jobs that allowed us to do or buy anything that we pleased.  We wore our self-sufficiency like a badge of honor.  Our culture, seduced by the “American dream,” praised us for it.  Even fellow church-goers questioned why we had to ask others for support, why we were placed in this position of dependency on others and, ultimately, God.

However, depending on others has increased our dependency on God.  Slowly, we began to realize that we can’t do this through our own efforts and abilities.  Rather, God has to move hearts for His mission among His people.  He has to come through for us.

Now in this final stage of support-raising, we have to daily (or hourly) remind ourselves of these truths.  Kenya appears larger than a speck on the horizon of our consciousness.  It is now clearly within view, and we long to see and experience it up close and personal soon.  In our zeal to get there, we are too quick to cling to the notion that we can make this happen, that somehow we need to do more to push us across the finish line.  Yet God only asks us to be faithful to Him, and He will be faithful to us in our obedience.  Faithfulness for us means reaching out to the people that He continually connects us with to share our story and how He has been working in our lives.  God offers a precious gift to us and to them– to join Him in Kingdom expansion.  And we love inviting others to open this gift.  We are energized by sharing with others here about His Kingdom in Nairobi.

We are fully aware that our tendency toward self-sufficiency will be even more exposed while living cross-culturally.  We will be wholly out of our element.  We will be humbled even more than we have up to this point.  As foreigners in a borrowed culture, we will have little choice but to rely upon God and others.  And for the simplest things– like driving, buying groceries, making our house a home.  We will be made more resilient in the process– if only we lean into our new-found dependency, embracing it until it becomes second nature to us. Or our first response.

How do you practice dependency upon God (especially in a culture where everything is literally at our fingertips)?