So I've been fund raising full time since May but a little bit since January. In all my encounters with people where I discuss my fund raising, so often I hear the comment "It is too bad you can't just be on campus..." or "What is the point of making you have to raise so much before you're on campus...". Now during this season where I'm fund raising but not enough is coming in; where there are days I think that nothing is coming from the effort I put in; where I question God why and when; and now forced to find a part time job, I have come to realize that I am so much like Moses. As I was doing my devotional today through "My Utmost For His Highest", this particular topic was on individual discouragement and personal enlargement (the passage is below). The past they were looking at was back in Exodus 2 when Moses feels the need and calling to save his people but is forced into the wilderness only to be called back in 40 years. As Oswald Chambers explains Moses circumstances he reveals something else. Moses wasn't ready to lead and fulfill the vision he had, until he was able to say when finally called back "Who am I". It took 40 years in the wilderness caring for sheep and learning communion with God before he was ready to fill the vision God had originally gave him.
So what does any of this have to do with fund raising you ask? EVERYTHING! For a staff that is fund raising, that season of seeing God's vision for the campus but not being funded enough to get on campus is an equivalent to the 40 years in the wilderness for Moses. We know we are called but God wants to teach us a few things first until our vision is no longer about me being able to do what I know I can do but about God and His plans and that He is the one sending me. In the mean time though, even though my desire is to be working with students, God is teaching me valuable lessons about how to walk with Him. Everyone in IV tells you that what you learn in fund raising is very applicable to what we do in ministering to student. However, I would like to take it a step farther and say that this is a time where God is teaching me how to better spend time and walk with Him. He is giving me this wilderness experience for my own good. Even though it can become discouraging as an individual, it is actually to prepare me for His calling in my life.
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So what is the purpose of fund raising? Why should I be forced to do such a thing? The purpose of fund raising is to make me less and Him more, to get to that point where I can honestly say "Who am I to go and minister to these students?" "Who am I to be called to lead an InterVarsity Chapter?" It is to put things in the right perspective and learn how to closely walk with the One by whose strength alone can I accomplish the vision He has given me. Like any job there is some form of training, and this is my training ground, the wilderness of fund development. So I will "tend my sheep" here until God knows I am ready and brings me to care for the students on the college campus.
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October 13thIndividual discouragement and personal enlargement
Moses went unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens. Exodus 2:11.
Moses saw the oppression of his people and felt certain that he was the one to deliver them, and in the righteous indignation of his own spirit he started to right their wrongs. After the first strike for God and for the right, God allowed Moses to be driven into blank discouragement, He sent him into the desert to feed sheep for forty years. At the end of that time, God appeared and told Moses to go and bring forth His people, and Moses said—‘Who am I, that I should go?’ In the beginning Moses realized that he was the man to deliver the people, but he had to be trained and disciplined by God first. He was right in the individual aspect, but he was not the man for the work until he had learned communion with God.
We may have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants, and we start to do the thing; then comes something equivalent to the forty years in the wilderness, as if God had ignored the whole thing, and when we are thoroughly discouraged God comes back and revives the call, and we get the quaver in and say—‘Oh, who am I!’ We have to learn the first great stride of God—“I AM THAT I AM hath sent thee.” We have to learn that our individual effort for God is an impertinence; our individuality is to be rendered incandescent by a personal relationship to God (see Matthew 3:11). We fix on the individual aspect of things; we have the vision—‘This is what God wants me to do’; but we have not got into God’s stride. If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a big personal enlargement ahead.
Chambers, O. (1986). My utmost for his highest: Selections for the year. Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering.
