My name is
Emily Petti and I’m going to be a sophomore at Cornell University.
I want to
start out by saying that this was my sixth mission trip with PPC, and I have
absolutely loved every single one of them.
The moment I realized how much this one stuck out to me was when Sean
asked us who would like to give a sermon this Sunday, and my hand shot right
up. For the previous five trips, as
passionately as I felt about them, I had never volunteered to give a sermon
before. It took me a little while to
work out why I wanted to today, but I realized that it was because this week
finally brought to light something that someone said to me on my very first
mission trip.
I’m sure
we’ve all heard it said that God has a plan for his people. But this is a very difficult thing to
understand. It seems like if God has a
plan, things shouldn’t be going wrong all the time. What’s more, we deserve to be enlightened
about this mysterious plan of his, but we’re not. We have no idea what it is, and how are we
supposed to figure it out?
The first
time I was prompted to think about God’s plan for me was on my first mission
trip five years ago. I was the youngest
of my crew of six, going into freshman year of high school. I looked up to this one boy in particular,
Taylor, who was going into his freshman year of college. After leaving the mission trip, I read all of
my care cards, and found that Taylor had written me an awesome note. What he said always stuck with me. I brought it with me so I could share it with
you all. He said:
“Emily,
having you in the group was a godsend.
You are funny and have an eerily sarcastic voice. You will most likely have great groups in the
years to come, but don’t forget about crew #15.
Staying in touch is what we will do.
Stay classy, don’t change. God
has a plan for you. Taylor”
In the past
five years, I have not once forgotten the last line of that card.
“God has a
plan for you.”
I thought it
was pretty cool that he said that to me!
I had absolutely no idea what he meant by it, but it felt pretty special
that someone I looked up to would tell me that God has a plan for me. I wondered what holy secrets he knew that he
could say that so confidently.
My eyes were
opened this week. I started to see
glimpses of what it really means for God to have a plan for us.
So if you
were following our blog, you may have seen a couple mentions of sledgehammers…? If not, I’ll recap briefly. My group got to our site on the first day all
excited because we knew our assignment was to take out a porch and build a new
one. We came in with a plan: demolish,
and then build.
It turned
out that the existing porch was concrete, and we spent all of Monday smashing
it with sledgehammers. We only knocked
down about a foot of concrete on either side of the porch by the end of the
day. At this point, we knew there was no
way we were going to get to the building part.
This was
God’s first test for us. We would just
have to patiently spend the rest of the week dealing with the concrete. God
surprised us with a different plan, that we weren’t so sure we liked. But the week proved differently. His plan wasn’t to make us miserable, or
challenge us physically, or see how many pieces of concrete we could carry
before falling over. It was to teach us
to be calm, patient, diligent, and open-minded.
I would say
his plan worked. We were encouraging
each other that week with enthusiasm that I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced,
even in my most intense soccer games. It
also put a ton of things in perspective for me, and all that concrete actually
helped me leave behind a lot of annoyances that I no longer found
important.
I was also
struck that week by a few comments that our carpenters made about their
jobs. So if you don’t know, this year’s
mission trip was different than previous years because we were working with
experienced carpenters on the job site, rather than doing it pretty much all by
ourselves.
One of the
days, Carolyn and I were expressing to the carpenters how incredible it was to
be working with professionals who were so talented at their job. The two men looked at each other, and sort of
laughing, one of them said, “Well we’ve never been called professionals
before.” We didn’t really know what to
make of it.
Later on, we
were all talking about school, and one of them said “Well if I knew I would end
up here in my life I would have worked a lot harder in school.” They told us to keep focused and work hard in
school so that we wouldn’t have to do this type of work for a living. They said all of this with a laugh, but in
talking with them further it was clear they didn’t really take pride in the way
their careers were turning out. This
life of working as low-paid carpenters was not what they had planned for
themselves or their families.
I think it’s
so easy to see their situation and think that it’s very sad. They’re not making much money, while their
jobs are more physically and mentally taxing than most of us can probably imagine. But if we open our eyes, we can see the
beauty in this situation. God is at work
here, and he has a plan for them. Every day that they work to repair the homes
of underprivileged families, they are spreading love and hope to everyone they
interact with. This reached through to
us as volunteers. They were honestly our
personal miracle workers that week. And
then on top of that they were so amazingly grateful for our help.
After the
week I feel like I have a new understanding of God’s plan for us. I don’t think we’re necessarily supposed to
know what it is. It’s not always about
figuring out our careers, or making our relationships with our friends and
families perfect. It’s not even about
having a clear layout of a project and following it step by step.
As much as
we’d like it to be perfect, God’s plan is messy and unclear. It’s about living with love and compassion,
and just seeing where that takes us. It’s
about opening our eyes and seeing God in strange and unexpected places, like
underneath a house in Hazard, Kentucky. After
six mission trips, I now see how Taylor said those words to me so many years
ago with such confidence. Because it’s
not about figuring out exactly what God’s plan is, but simply knowing that he
has one.