During our second week of camp I was given the opportunity to share my testimony with the camp. For me this was very intimidating because I’ve never shared with a group bigger than a handful of people. None the less while preparing for my testimony I was given the opportunity to truly reflect on how I’ve come to be at the place I now am in my life. I’m not going to go into my testimony right now, but I am truly thankful to God for giving me that opportunity. I don’t know if my words planted any seeds, I don’t know if something was lost in translation or if it came across crystal clear. I do know that if nothing else the Lord gave me a chance to see the amazing works he has done in my life. Sometimes I think we take for granted how we got to be at the place we are now. We have our testimony memorized and know what parts will really bring into what we are saying. But if we really sit and reflect about how we got to where we are, we truly see the miracle and grace that is God. There is not way I could have told you I was going to be on a missions trip for a year a few years ago. When I look at the events of my life I can’t help but believe that God has a plan for me that will take me to places that I can’t imagine over the next year and beyond. I can see God working in our lives and already answering prayers. No I haven’t seen any sick healed or raisings from the dead. We have prayed as a team for the opportunity to minister to some of the campers this week since this group seems a bit more distand and there seem to be some barriers in place that haven’t been present in previous weeks. Not 10 minutes after we prayed for this one of the camper’s leaders came over to us and asked if we would each sit with a group of the children during meals so that we could speak to them and so they could ask a questions. Now I know to many this wouldn’t be a mind blowing revelation, but to me this shows that God is using us now and will continue to use us to plant seeds in the lives we come across.
As I said in the last blog, we have done quite a bit of manual labor and manual lifting. It has been difficult to maintain a mindset that we are doing the Lord’s work but digging dirt from sun up to sundown. But at the end of each camp we’ve had staff members from the different group come up to us and say we appreciate the hard work that they see us doing all day. So I try to use this a confirmation that we are doing exactly what the Lord has planned for us even if it doesn’t seem as grandiose as we initially expected.
I have one prayer request, in the next few days we leave for Romania. We have a 48 hour train ride to look forward to if all goes well. The problem is that there has been some pretty severe flooding in Romania and Western Ukraine so many trains have been cancelled. So please just pray that the Lord opens up the opportunity for us to get where we need to go safely whether that be by the original route or another one that He shows us!
