Jessica Wong's Story
Journey to a Life of Missionsby Jessica Wong
For my whole life, I wanted to be a doctor, and now I want to be a cook. I’m not entirely sure what happened. All I really know is that God has a perfect, wonderful plan for me, and it was vastly different than anything I could have imagined for myself.
I was every Asian parent’s dream – I wanted to be a doctor. By the time I started college, I had written sixty-page papers on medicine, built scaled anatomical models, spent countless hours in operating rooms watching surgeries. I knew exactly what I wanted. And then God got my attention through a little group called InterVarsity. I spent my first year continuously seeing new pictures of the Jesus I thought I knew. I began to see a God who loves the sick and poor, fights for justice, showers us with gifts of mercy and grace, a God whose desire is to see shalom come and His people reconciled. This was a much more radical God than the one I had learned about in Sunday School, and a God who I could sense was leading me to something as radical as Him.
As God daily led me to submit to His authority in my life, I began to fall in love with helping others see more of Jesus. And after Urbana 03, knew that Jesus was leading me into a lifetime of ministry. As I continued to explore the practical implications on my life, God began to simultaneously develop my heart for the urban poor, as well as my joy of cooking. In the same week, I would lead a group from my dorm community to Skid Row, LA’s most condensed and highest populated homeless area, to interact with the homeless there, and also spend a weekend leading younger students to cook for a hundred person conference. And my question to Jesus became, ok, I’m being obedient to you, but what in the world are you doing? What does urban ministry have to do with cooking?
Nearing graduation, the question still remained unanswered, but I did know I needed to learn more about urban missions. And what better way to learn, than to do it. God led me to Servant Partners, and a two year internship, where I am tent-making in inner-city Pasadena. I spend my time working a full-time job, building relationships with my neighbors, receiving amazing teaching about urban ministry, social justice, and racial reconciliation, and directing a reading program for neighborhood elementary school children. God has also been showing me his innovativeness in giving me a vision to use cooking as business as a tool for justice. While He is still only slowly revealing the details, I know that as long as I continue to be obedient to His leading, I’ll eventually reach the fullness and glory of His plan.
And my encouragement is that you continue to seek out Jesus’ specific plan for you. It’s all too easy to settle for what we think we want, or what others tell us to pursue. Sometimes our passions and gifts don’t seem like they make sense at all, and we can’t decipher what God could be planning, and that is ok. God is so much bigger than us and our own plans, and as long as we’re faithful in being obedient, we will enter into the fullness and glory of His plans for us.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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