What do you do when ministry doesn’t look like you envisioned it?
You embrace it. You let God show you what He wants.
Over the past two weeks ministry has looked more like a vacation and making new friends than what I envisioned when I signed up for the World Race. We have had time to rest and more comforts than I thought possible in one month of the race. Let me explain a little more.
We have gone to the “fake beach,” a man made lake with a beautiful bike path around it. We have gone on a hike just outside the city and explored Kalemegdan, an old fort that has ruins dating back to the Roman Empire. We have spent a lot of time at the city center walking up and down, eating ice cream and drinking coffee, watched street artists paint beautiful pictures and we have gone to the park to play football. So where does ministry come in?
Our ministry this month is Evangelism…it’s this scary thing where you have to start conversations with people you don’t know and try to figure out how to fit Jesus into the conversation, right? Is it only something that we have to do when we travel half way around the world on a mission trip? Is it something that we set aside time in our busy schedule to do and add it to a to-do list for the week, month or year?
Wrong.
Evangelism is something we get to do everyday as we go about our normal routine. It is allowing the Holy Spirit to speak in everyday moments and responding with a yes. A few weeks ago I would have thought that I did a pretty good job at this. I would look for opportunities to share with the people around me. I wouldn’t shy away from conversations with people about my faith or what God is doing in my life. Leaving for an 11 month mission trip gave me plenty of opportunities to do that.
But everytime I did, it fit into my schedule. Back home I kept my life busy. I scheduled and planned almost every moment of my life. Flexibility isn’t something I allowed for because there was always something else that I had to be doing. Allowing the Holy Spirit to speak and have my response be a yes didn’t happen often. It was often an “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” as I rush from one thing to the next.
The past two weeks I have had more time to rest and spend quiet time with God. I have learned to walk at a slower pace instead of rushing to the next thing. I have learned, and still am learning, that planning doesn’t matter if it doesn’t allow room for God to move. As my team has leisurely walked around Belgrade we have opened our hearts to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. When He says, ‘check out that street artist over there, love him.’ Our response is ‘yes.’ Now our guys have gotten together with a local artist for ice cream (He showed them the best place in Belgrade, yum!), and dinner several times. The rest of our team has had the opportunity to meet him and extend even more love as we walk by him in the city center and always stop to chat. This is just one of several examples.
So, ministry hasn’t been the go, go, go that my team or I thought it would be. We have asked the questions, ‘What are we really doing this month? Shouldn’t we be doing more?’ However, in more than one way God has been working in each of our hearts, using the “down time” to teach us, mold us and show us more of how He wants to work in us personally and as a team.
Next week our hosts will be out of the country, our other roommates will all have left and it will be down to our team of six. Please be praying for what our ministry will look like when we no longer have people constantly with us to show us our way around on city transportation or translate when we need it. As a team we are looking forward to this as it will be a chance to pour into each other and become closer as a team.
