By Tessa Miller, Class of 2026
I found myself in a conversation with my host dad recently about God’s character and his heart toward his children/me. He challenged me with a question, “If you really believe that God desires to give you good gifts and see you live purposefully in your job, why wouldn’t you pursue something you really love?”
I am 5 months into this program and the awareness of God’s heart that I have experienced through processing life’s transitions has been transformative. Throughout all of our lives, we form beliefs about God, ourselves, and others through our upbringing, life experiences, and how we have been discipled in community. Naturally through brokenness, this can lead to false representations and inaccurate ideas of who God is. One defining quality of the rich community I am currently experiencing is the way it has revealed my skewed beliefs about the character of Christ that I have found easier to accept. I am rubbing up against a new culture and am confronted with this risky truth: God is better than I thought He was.
It can feel comfortable (maybe safer?) to believe that God desires me to constantly demonstrate my love for Him through sacrificial decisions as a way to learn or cultivate contentment. It is risky, yet dependent and wise, to make decisions with creativity and longing to lean on His gracious presence to provide for me. The sweet, yet sometimes scary, reality is that this posture toward God may lead me somewhere I never would have expected to go.
The Charlotte Fellows program has given me a safe place to practice and learn the beauty of making decisions from a heart posture that believes God delights in me. I am choosing to pursue career paths that I did not allow myself before. I am choosing to pursue relationships in honest ways that seemed too risky before. I am learning the art of longing, and letting my longing be loud even through discomfort. Through the experiential sweetness of Jesus in ways I have not before seen, gratitude has been a constant friend.
“For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Psalm 51:16-17
“Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” Matthew 7:9-11