Help

Guys,

I need your prayers. Don’t let the rosy emails fool you, I am dying down here, and yesterday it got much worse. This trip will either heal me or convince me once and for all that I am unfit for ministry (which will mean a slow death for me). The guest speaker at church last night was a prophetess. I was determined not to go up front because I was certain she would expose me as the sinner/fraud I feel like most of the time. I told God that if He wanted to speak to me through her she would have to call me out, which she did a matter of seconds later. She told me some encouraging things (that I am hungry for God, that I will be much more than a missionary if I seek after Him), but she also told me I would not marry my girlfriend, Ellison, and that has devastated me. Jose and Yolanda essentially told me the same thing, without even meeting her.

It’s back to the same old story — nothing good ever happens to me, so it’s up to me to conjure up something on my own which God will eventually take away (and punish me for). I know it’s a messed up view of God rooted somewhere in never being the “beloved son”, but I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to hear God’s voice, and my fear of what He might say keeps me from even trying. Jose telling me “it’s easy, just believe” doesn’t help much, it just makes me feel more incompetent.

SVA wants to fly me home in a few weeks to talk about future plans, and I was ready to tell them that after September I want to focus more on marriage/family than on missions for a few years. Now I just want to curl up in a corner and disappear. But I can’t hide here, and I am far from the friends who could help me, so my two primary coping strategies are unavailable, and now I have lost the relationship that was getting me by. I know God is isolating me so I have nowhere to turn but Him, but I am still afraid of Him, and disgusted with myself which makes it worse. Frank said you guys would parachute in if I needed you. Well, I need you.

Thanks,
-Tos