If you’ve been around me at all recently, then you know just how crazy obsessed I am with Isaiah 61 (If you’re not familiar with it, I would 10 out of 10 recommend that you go read it as soon as you’re done reading this blog post!) Last year, my YoungLife area adopted Isaiah 61 as our own little anthem for the year. And I stood in awe as the words written in Isaiah 61 began to come to life right before my eyes and the Lord showered Westlake and Lake Travis with His favor time and time again. But, at the time I never really felt like these words were for me specifically. I liked them and I embraced them for my area, but I never really owned them as my own. Then, when I got accepted to the world race, the Lord kept putting Isaiah 61 on my heart. He kept whispering, “Ashley, this is it, this is going to be your Isaiah 61 year.”” But I didn’t want to receive it. Instead of embracing my upcoming Isaiah 61 year, I ran away from it. My response wasn’t, “YASSS! That’s so lit! Let’s do this thing, God!” It looked a lot more like, “God, that was so last year. Weren’t You there? We talked about Isaiah 61 all the time at area meetings and I literally sat there and watched Your favor rain down on Austin West.”
As launch got closer and closer, and as God continued to tug harder and harder on my heartstrings, it became clear that He was serious about this Isaiah 61 thing and so I finally decided to name this year my very own Isaiah 61 year. But I’m not gonna lie, I was still a little skeptical. But it’s pretty hard to remain skeptical when the Lord pours His protection and provision onto you over and over again. And this past month was full of little confirmations that this is indeed my very own real life Isaiah 61 year and I just can’t help but tell everyone about it because the Lord is just that dang good!
So, here’s a little list of just some of the ways, both big and small, that God has shown me that this is in fact the year of the Lord’s favor in just the past month:
1. Paragliding is all fun and games until you almost get impaled by sharp branches when you crash into a forest on the side of a mountain. But luckily, God is the ultimate protector and He parted the trees and made the parachute get tangled up in the branches in just the right way so that I wasn’t too far off of the ground and could easily get down from my harness and back onto solid ground and there was a clear pathway through all the trees and the rocks up the side of the mountain back to the road and we were within walking distance of the place where we took off from and I walked away with just a little splinter in my hand, a couple little scratches, some dirt on my clothes, and some leaves in my hair.
2. Long travel days are fine and dandy until you run out of snacks and you don’t have money to buy more food and you’re on hour 20 something of your how many times can we say just a couple more hours till it’s actually true bus ride and you’re almost at hangry status. But just when I thought I wasn’t gonna make it, the Lord came in clutch and one of my way too generous squad mates offered to share his last pieces of bread and last little bit of peanut butter with me so that I could have a happy tummy and an even happier heart.
3. Going on overnight trips on long holiday weekends always sound like a great idea until you can’t find an affordable place to stay so you randomly email some dude whose contact information you got from some past racers and you just have to hope and pray that these people are legit. And then the Lord blew me away with a place to stay that was magical and cozy and so full of Him and hosts who felt like long lost grandparents, who spoke Life into us and made us delicious home cooked meals and showered us with love the whole time we stayed with them.
4. Simple things like trips to the supermarket can easily turn into a long drawn out process when you’re in a foreign country and don’t really know your way around and your sense of direction is practically nonexistent and you barely speak the language. But what we see as wrong turns and steps in the wrong direction, the Lord sees as where He intended for you to go the whole time. And so instead of bringing us directly to the supermarket, He first brought us to the very wrong place where a man with a broken down car was stranded on the side of road and starting to lose hope. All he needed was some water to get him car going again, and we just so happened to have filled up our water bottles right before we left and brought them with us on our journey. We were able to give him the water that he needed and he was able to get his car to start again.
5. Just showing up at a place on adventure day and not really having a plan or an agenda sounds like it’ll be really cool until you end up in the middle of nowhere at the very wrong lake and you have no idea where you are or what’s around you or how to get back. But just when we started thinking that the whole thing was a bust, the Lord brought us the most awesome human who let us ride on the top of his Land Rover to the most incredible waterfall where we got to explore and stand in awe of God’s marvelous creation and eat the most delicious street corn.
6. All squad month is so much fun until you’re balling on a real tight budget and the food portions are smaller than you’re used to and you’re left feeling hungry all the time. And then the Lord brought extra food from some of the most unexpected places so that I could go to sleep with a full belly every night. Whether it was food that other people didn’t want to eat or someone’s leftovers or food that members of the church brought us as gifts to thank us for serving, at the church, any time that I was feeling especially hungry, the Lord always surprised me with extra food.
7. If I’ve learned one thing during my time on the world race so far, it’s that just like God doesn’t fit into some nice little man made box for what we think He should be like, ministry also cannot be contained by some nice little human-constructed definition of what it should look like. And sometimes your ministry involves passing out lots and lots of flyers in the streets of Carapungo to promote your English class and hopefully draw people’s attention to your church and bring people to the church who normally wouldn’t be be caught dead inside a church otherwise. And just when I was starting to feel like the whole thing was pointless and I had seen one too many of our flyers crumbled up and thrown on the ground and I had been rejected by one too many people, the Lord places a street vendor named Charles in our path. This man has been hurt by the Church and has been burned by some religious people in his life. His heart is so hardened towards Christianity and God in general that he is convinced that he doesn’t need a God and that the trees are the best friends he will ever have and that if only he had enough money then he would be happy and satisfied. My heart broke for him. And even though he didn’t accept the Father’s free of gift of eternal life through Jesus that day, the Lord was sweet enough to let me see some fruit from our conversation. I got to see his heart of stone start to soften and I got see him start to open his mind to the idea that the Creator of the universe loves him more than he could ever comprehend and He longs to be his friend. Even though I didn’t get to see the harvest, I know that the seeds were planted and that made the whole encounter and everything leading up to it so so worth it.
8. Walking uphill to the bus station every day so that you can get from where you’re staying to your ministry site doesn’t sound all that horrible until you realize that the altitude is real and it’s not playing any games. And on a particularly rough morning, when the hunger and lack of sleep and soreness from an especially tough work out the day before were way too real, the walk uphill to the bus stop seemed almost impossible. But God is oh so good and just as we were getting ready to leave that morning, one of the men who worked at the place where we were staying was also happened to be leaving for the day and he offered to give us a ride to the bus station so that we wouldn’t have to walk up that dreaded hill.
9. Having adopted parents at the house that you’re living in with your whole squad for the entire month is super awesome until they call family meetings to give you all these rules and lecture you when you’re doing a bad job of following them. And on one such occasion, just when I started to roll my eyes and think, “Oh great, here we go again. What did we do wrong this time?” our adopted dad shared the sweetest little bit of encouragement with us and it hit me in all the feels and it was just the little reminder that I needed. He talked about bananas and how we always want the perfect yellow ones and that we tend to stay away from the ones covered in bruises and brown spots, but that it’s actually those nasty looking bruised bananas that are the sweetest ones. And we are just like the bananas-we want the perfectly yellow lives, the ones with no rough spots or blemishes, but actually the bumps and bruises, the hard things that we go through, bring out the sweetness in life.
