Hi! I'm Emily Autry, and I'm excited to re-launch and re-introduce myself on this platform. I am a 2020-2022 US-2 Global Mission Fellow for the United Methodist Church. I want to invite you hear my call story and how God worked in my own life to get me where I am today.
I experienced heaven on earth one time. It was the closest I have ever felt to what I think God intends this world to look like and feel like. But in order to set this story up, I have to go back to over a year ago. I had just graduated college, I was stressed, and exhausted. Although finishing college was a huge accomplishment, all the work on my thesis and finishing the year had taken toil on me. I was depressed. I had no job, I had given up on attending seminary, and I had never finished my application for Global Ministries. So I moved home and I worked at a restaurant. I kept asking, “What am I even doing?”
All my friends were moving away, getting real jobs, and I just felt stuck, sorry for myself, worthless, and sad. I drank away my feelings. I distracted myself with trips, spent too much money, and slept. A lot.
In early October, I was in a really rotten place. I was still drinking. This time with migraines, friendship stresses, and in between jobs. I was asked to attend a conference for my church for multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic churches by myself, and report back with what I learned. So off I went to Dallas, TX to a conference with at least 1,000 other people that I did not know. In that giant sanctuary, with people of every age, gender, race, culture, ethnic group from all over the country and even world, I experienced heaven on earth. We sang every kind of song with all our beautiful voices. We heard empowering messages about a God that Loves ALL people. We shared meals, learned, laughed, and loved. This was when it finally clicked that God had been with me the whole time. I was called. I was chosen. I was loved exactly the way that I was even in my darkest times. I was called to extend God’s table wider, longer, shorter or even taller, for all God’s children to be able to eat and eat abundantly.
When I went home, I shared about all the amazing things God had done in my life at the conference. I started my application again to be apart of Global Ministries and serve as a missionary. But this time was different, I was ready to go, I was all in, and something in me had changed. Little did I know that over the next nine months, I would be resurrected by God. I would find community. I would stop drinking. I would gain my confidence, and most importantly I would be chosen to serve as a Global Mission Fellow.
Friends, hear the good news! God is calling all of us to be apart of creating heaven on earth. I am asking you to please join me in creating and living out this vision to create a table for all people. I will be serving in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church as a Coordinator for the Fill the Table Initiative. Please support me with your prayers and your gifts. My advancement number is 3022615.
Together, we can extend the table and fill a table for everyone.
This blog will continue to tell this on going story. I am excited to begin my time in Miami, Florida and with the Florida Annual Conference and the Fill the Table Initiative. I hope the Surrender Journal will be a place of hope and love. I hope to tell of a story of mission that aims to see differently and serve differently. I do not have all the answers and I will not force my gospel on anyone. However, I will graciously come along side those already doing the work. I will ask God to open my eye to see differently, to hear differently, and to serve differently. Amen.