Wow, month 7!! Here we are! I never thought we could have gotten here so fast. But nonetheless, here we are feeling confident and so incredibly loved because of all the amazing people we have ALL OVER THE WORLD praying for us and supporting us. There are people we have never even met who are praying specifically for personal and ministry related needs!! Literally the church and Body of Christ in practice! Thank you to each and every one of you who has been a part of and has enabled this journey!
One of the visions that AIM has for us racers is to have us do ministry that equips us to practically seek the Lord for the duration of our time overseas and learn to walk in that every day for the rest of our lives. We are taught to understand prayer as a conversation and are invited to get to know the voice of the Lord more and more. We emphasize sitting in prayer with an intent to listen and an expectation for Him to speak and lead us. Absolutely we are constantly seeking to follow the Lord’s leading in day to day, but this type of ministry is incorporated into our race for an entire month. We call it “Ask the Lord,” or ATL ministry. For this month, you aren’t assigned to a specific ministry, you don’t have provided lodging, etc. You literally ask the Lord to show you EVERYTHING. Where he wants you to go, who he wants you to minister to, what he wants you to do, and so on.
So here in month 7, it is now an ATL month for us!
We sat down as a team and asked the Lord EVERYTHING. We asked the Father where he wanted us to go, and our options were pretty wide open. Our only guidelines were to not go to north Serbia, Montenegro, or Bulgaria. That’s it. From there, we asked the Lord to give us a vision for daily ministry. Some other teams on the squad felt the Lord calling them to go work with refugees, and some felt the call to tourist ministry; some were given very specific cities to go to by the Lord, and some were given a more broad choice from Him. In those broad visions for the month, we trust and ask the Lord to guide us through each day. We ask the Lord to give us a prompting on where to buy our coffee, who to talk to, and what to pray for.
ATL is a great ministry for us at this point in the race because we are past the halfway point. Many of us have started thinking about what life is going to look like when we get home. This ministry is an opportunity to practice living missionally as a lifestyle like we would back home. We get to practice everything we have learned up to this point by listening to the Holy Spirit. This month we are going to “just do life” and ask the Lord to lead us into daily ministry opportunities.
When we asked the Lord where he wanted us this month, we felt called to Greece. However, we didn’t want to be that team that was going to the seemingly magical Greece for their ATL month because they really just want to do tourist things and be cool… *rolls eyes*…
We wanted to make sure that we were going because that was really where the Lord was calling us, and not because that was our fleshly desires. But in our time spent in prayer, the Lord led us to ministry in Thessaloniki.
As a quick disclaimer, here is what people think of when they hear Greece contrasted with what we are actually experiencing. These are real pictures outside our apartment/hostel.
What people THINK when they hear Greece…
What we’re actually seeing…
The Lord led us here, to the streets of Thessaloniki. He gave us the vision of providing the simple needs of the people around us: giving bread to the homeless, bringing flowers to the widows, and spreading joy to the public through public worship. These are just a few of the things that the Lord shared with us. It turned out to be a more difficult vision than we anticipated. We had a difficult time finding anywhere in budget to stay. Greece was taken off our route originally because it has become too expensive to send teams there. This is where we need your help.
We have been called to provide for those around us. But we have little to no budget to do so. We need to be able to buy bread, poster board for ‘free hugs’ and ‘free prayer’ signs, to be able to buy flowers or buy someone’s coffee, etc. Could we use personal funds? Yes, we could. However, we were called into a month of discomfort and part of that is having to ask for money…AGAIN. So we have set up a GoFundMe account as a platform through which you can help us supplement our World Race budget. We will be pulling from the account at specific intervals and distribute to the team to use for ministry as we are led.
Please be aware of what this money is NOT going towards: our own food budget, our lodging, adventure things, etc. We are asking you to provide Christ’s Love to the people here in Thessaloniki. We are simply the vessels. Below is a link to the GoFundMe page we will be using as our platform.
https://www.gofundme.com/atl-provisions?lang=en-US
Thank you so much, and if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment or email me!
Updates to come soon as we kick off ministry! 🙂
