The past month has been an assortment of all things crazy and awesome. The Holy Spirit has been teaching me a lot about Himself and where He wants me in this life. There’s been so many things that have happened this past month that have challenged me and pushed me beyond limits. I have sought the Lord, and found Him all around me.
Our first month was spent at a before and after school program called Ecuasol. My team and I spent a lot of time with the kids. We also built a fence, painted a library, and scraped plaster off a wall. There were some days where it seemed we had nothing to do but the Lord was using those days to build our relationships with each other and the kids. Our last day there is fixed in my brain. It was like a normal day but everything felt different, we felt it and the kids felt it. I remember sitting on the bus that evening fighting back tears that were attempting to fall and watching my team mates do the same. These kids have a way of reaching into your chest and grabbing your heart. The name of my team is Meraki, which means to do something with all your heart to the point of leaving part of your heart in your work, and rightfully so because part of my heart will forever be at Ecuasol.
The Holy Spirit has been doing some amazing things outside of ministry as well. One morning everyone on my team did listening prayer and we each got a vision of something. Some of the visions were similar and others stood alone. A couple people got the word yellow, the colors red and green were also involved, someone got a picture of a house, and one of the volunteers at Ecuasol came up as well. We were working at Ecuasol that day so we just went about our normal day. We were eating lunch when we had to go help unload a ton of lettuce, it turns out they had accidentally ordered way too much so they gave us a bag full. At the bottom of the hill from Ecuasol was a little yellow house where we usually stopped to get food. This day we stopped to get food and we gave them the lettuce that just so happens to be green. The lady serving us was wearing red pants and a lady sitting inside was wearing a red shirt. We walked in and Kaiden, our squad leader, started talking to them. He asked if anyone was sick and everyone said no but the lady wearing a red shirt said she had some pain in her leg. We asked if we could pray and she said yes so we prayed and she said the pain was gone! The lady invited us to church and we said we would try.
Two weeks later we found ourselves sitting in a 3-hour church service that we didn’t understand at all. There was one point when the pastor asked us to stand up and introduce ourselves and we just sat there looking like idiots because we couldn’t understand. During worship I decided that I wouldn’t allow the language barrier to stop me from worshiping my God. The Holy Spirit showed me so much about what kingdom is and how He sees us when we worship. There is no such thing as a language barrier when the Holy Spirit is involved. I asked the Lord to reveal to me what he wanted me to get out of the service even though I don’t understand the language. I sat in this church service that I didn’t understand and God revealed more to me than He ever has in a so called “normal” church service. A direct quote from my notes that day is this, “when people gather to worship You it doesn’t matter what language they speak, all that matters is we gather with passionate hearts to see Your power manifested.”
Here I am, in the second month of this life called the World Race, and I couldn’t be more excited to see what the Lord has for me. I am living in Shell, Ecuador which is a little town in the jungle. My team is living with another team and we’re going to be working with three different ministries. I will have a more permanent position at an orphanage called Casa de Fe where I will be working from 9-5. The other two ministries are street ministry and trekking into the jungle to reach unreached people groups. Our teams will be here in Shell for the next 2 months and we are looking forward to what God is going to do in our lives and the people’s lives around us.
But I will hope continually, and I will praise you yet more and more.
Psalm 71:14
