Over the past month and a half, the Lord has really been showing me what I’m truly passionate about, as well as what my mission on the Race should be. What I hear quite a bit whenever I ask people about what they feel called to do here, I’m always met with responses like, “I want to go and play with all the orphans,” or, “I want to go and preach the gospel to all the tribes in the jungle.” The list goes on and on, but what I feel the Lord calling me to is a little different than that. I have felt a really strong pull lately to just be here and minister to my team.
My mission I feel is to foster growth in community; whether it be just being there for a friend and diving deep, or calling out the hard things that I see in the team. It’s a really cool thing to have placed on my heart, because community is probably one of the most important things in the world to me. To me community just brings so much joy, as well as a place to really create and foster growth in people.
Another thing that has really increased my desire for community is learning about the Greek word perichoresis. Perichoresis is a word commonly uses to describe the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the very basic definition of the word is simply rotation. But when you apply this word to the Trinity, you begin to see this really cool relationship between the three. You begin to see how the three entities have their own individuality, yet at the same time make one being. That is the whole idea of what community is, and if you want a really good scriptural opinion on it read 1 Corinthians 12, that there are all these separate individuals yet at the same time we still make up one body.
So for a little bit of a story, one night my team and I were vision casting about what we wanted our team to look like, and I just kept hearing the same three words over and over. The phrase I kept hearing was, “Collective, yet separate.” Looking back now, I realize that I was basically just hearing that we should be a community, but at the time the word community isn’t what we needed to hear. We needed to understand that we were more than just a team, we were individuals working for the glory of the kingdom. When we look at the term community, it is easy to lose sight of the individuality in the term; except the fact is that the very essence of community is individuality. If we as the body really begin to seek out who we really are in the Lord, that is when community will be at its highest point. This is all just a long, drawn out way of saying what I’m called to is creating a real community with my team; and making sure that in that, we do not lose sight of our own individuality.
Now for more of an announcement note, my team and I are settling in nicely here in Portoviejo. We have a very full 2 months of ministry here, and we honestly couldn’t be happier. Just keep praying that we do not over work ourselves, and that even in our tiredness we will still seek to be a community. Another thing is that I am still in the process of becoming fully funded, so if you would just keep praying into the Lord’s provision on that front for me! I just want to take a quick second to thank you all for reading this, as well as really taking a second to understand my heart! Your continued support means the world to me, and I wouldn’t want it any other way!
