The Academy Reflects

We’ve asked the members of the SOS Academy to share some reflections on their experience this year. Here’s a post from Devin Bledsoe, who is partnered with Multinational Ministries. You can learn more about Devin on our Staff page. Where do I begin? The beginning of this Academy year has been a whirlwind. As I think through how to write what has changed in my life the past two months, I realize this post would end up much shorter if I tell you what hasn’t changed. Everyday God is answering prayers that this year would challenge, teach and reveal to me more of Himself. I think I can sum up a lot of His work in me in a short but powerful phrase: dying to self. Dying to selfish ambitions, selfish thoughts and selfish uses of my time. In that process, which I will never be able to achieve on my own, I recognize more clearly my need for Jesus every waking minute of my day. In my job, in our intern team dinners, in our reading and discussions each Friday, God is working to bring me out of myself and into the reality of the broken world we live in.

For some time I have kept myself in a very comfortable place, a comfortable life, seeking my own interests far more often than I seek the interests of others. More often I seek my own desires before I seek what God desires of me. Oh, how I have been humbled and awakened to see just how much I rule my own life! As I see both who I am and who God is more clearly, His heart for the poor is also made much more clear. In all that we are learning and reading in the Academy, the idea of “helping” the poor is not so much the idea which I - or maybe most of us - have in mind. Very often I want a simple answer, but the truth is that it is far more complex and involves much more of my time and my heart to answer God’s call to care for His people. I am still learning what that process really means, but this much I know--God is here. He is working in Binghampton, and He is working in the beauty and the brokenness all over this city. I know without a doubt that I am here, and I am not here by chance. I am here to be a neighbor, to be a friend, and to live life, fully and joyfully in Christ and in Binghampton.