Emma’s Echo
In 2021, while driving home alone, and under a waning crescent moon, at 19 years old, Emma met her Savior, Jesus, on a Florida highway.
She asked me once why people wanted to be her friend. She was never in the “popular crowd.” And she often compared herself to others and felt insecure and inadequate. I told her it was because she saw people. She noticed them. And then she went to them. In a world where we look at screens more than eyes, it was a gift that drew others in. She took this gift with her on three mission trips–to Nicaragua and Bolivia–and down the socially isolated halls of her high school–and it was there that she fell in love with the vulnerable.
I once heard that great students often make lousy teachers, because unless you’ve struggled with the material, it is hard to help others. I think this is why Emma was so effective at showing Christ’s love. In her journals, she writes, “I compare myself to other girls and wonder how I could ever measure up…,” but quickly follows with “the comparison trap tricks us into thinking that God’s blessings are in limited supply.”
This drive to see herself as God sees her, and to show others this same love, propelled her to step out of her comfort zone and to draw alongside others on the fringes. In Bolivia she writes, “I took a chance and followed what I knew the Lord was calling me to do, and because of that I was able to sit comfortably with girls I hadn’t known just an hour earlier and I was able to sing with them about the beauty of our God. Meeting people and getting to know people’s hearts might not be as hard as I thought….I just have to say yes. Say yes to being uncomfortable and say yes to the beauty, all of it.”
The night that she died–just hours earlier–she once again wrestled with the feeling of not feeling worthy of Christ’s love and she writes, “God saved me once when I was fully separated from Him, and He saves me each day still from the trap of sin. My salvation is the most beautiful gift of grace in my life and it is wrong for me to question it because of my own shortcomings. He said, ‘It is finished.’ I feel that I am incapable of being loved by God but I forget that He is perfect in love. I am not big enough to mess that up and no amount of sin and mistakes can take that away. And wow, how much would my life change if I lived in that blessing?...I am fully loved and fully known...There is purpose in the pruning.”
How much more would our lives change if we lived in that blessing? Fully loved and fully known. God’s blessings are not in limited supply. We just have to say yes.
This is the legacy we now carry at Emma’s Echo and through the power of our Savior who is holding her now–where she is more “fully loved and fully known” than her earthly frame could have ever imagined. Because…
God is perfect in love. And His blessings are not in limited supply. We just have to say yes.
