Peace from the Middle East!
I’m writing to you from the beautiful Istanbul, Turkey. My apologies for lacking in my blogging. The past few weeks have been hard for me. In fact, they are definitely (so far anyway) the most challenging since being on The Race.
About a week and a half ago our leadership here on The World Race made a dramatic change. New squad leaders have been raised up from inside our squad. Mike and Denise Murphy and my team leader, Tamica Sloan are now the new leaders over all of K squad. Along with new this new leadership, our small teams have been completely mixed up. My new team, Oasis, consists of Casey and Erin Scritchfield, Ashley Higgins, Heather Reed (from my old team, Kingdom Unity), Lauren Williamson (also from K.U.), and Paul Iwanaga (our team leader).
While this new team is full of amazing people, I’m still grieving the loss of my old team. I’ve never been in a serious romantic relationship, nor have I really ever been in love. But I imagine heartbreak would feel something like what I’ve been feeling over the past 2 weeks.
I’ve spent the past 3 months doing life with 6 amazing people. I’ve seen them at their worst and they’ve seen me at my worst. We’ve cried together and we’ve laughed together and we’ve grown together. They literally feel like my real brothers and sisters. It’s the weirdest thing. I’m completely in love with them and we’ve been broken up now and I don’t understand.
I don’t know why it happened this way.
But what I do know is that this is exactly God’s will for me. It’s His will for me to gain new sisters and new brothers. It’s His will for each of us to go through this grief, to go through the awkwardness and getting to know new people. Being smack dab in the middle of His perfect will for my life sure beats the heck out of any plan I could make. After all, this is what I signed up for.
One of my first prayers when I signed up for The World Race was that God would stretch me and use me no matter the cost. I didn’t realize the weight of that prayer then but now that I’m here, it’s still worth praying everyday.
Each day gets better and better and I’m trying to allow myself to be vulnerable, and that’s good. I’m seeing the different characteristics of Jesus in each of my new teammates and I’m seeing that they are beautiful. I can’t wait to fall in love with these guys too. I can’t wait for God to do crazy awesome things in us and through us. I can’t wait for breakthrough.
Tomorrow my team and I will head to Thessaloniki, Greece (YEAH!!!!), where we’ll be searching for an unreached people group. We know this certain people group exsists somewhere in Turkey but no one knows where. However, we know where they are in Greece so we’re hoping someone there will know where they are in Turkey too. Does that make sense what I just said?
Pray for us as we go. As is becoming somewhat normal routine for me, we don’t know what we’re doing or where we’re sleeping until we get there.
