In Arizona I am helping
another ministry called Rock Ministries in the mountains with the Apache
people. They are leading mission’s teams
from different churches. This past week
we had a family mission’s team from Indiana, Florida and Virginia. Actually it was my first time on a Native
American Reservation so I was in the same boat as many of the people who came
on this trip! Definitely a new
experience being in the desert especially when someone showed me some scorpions
they found in the church!!! I was like we don’t have those in Michigan! Haha, they were so casual about it around here too!
Well, the team
that came had a combination of kids club (vacation bible school) and work
projects. I was put in charge the
exterior painting crew for one house. Since I was not sure how to do that I delegated 
some responsibility to
another leader who had done it in the past! But I definitely had a chance to get on the ladder and paint the trim of
the house. When we started painting the
house I really got to know the family and their daughter Kate. We hit it off right away talking about
sports, mainly basketball. In fact that
first day I think the majority of my time was spent talking to Kate and talking
to all the neighbors. It was good to
make relationships and share God with them. I am really excited about making a deeper friendship with Kate and
seeing her grow in her relationship with God. (picture is our staff up here)
As for the team
I got to pray for them a lot and make some honest and deep relationships with
them. I was really happy that they were
just open to me praying for them and challenging them. One of the guys had trouble sleeping and I
got to pray over him. The next few days
he kept coming back to me saying that he had incredible sleep. I was able to talk to a lot of the adults about
trusting God with their time and circumstances. I really feel like I was able to challenge them in their faith. I wanted them to realize that when we are
living everyday with God and surrendering to Him we are constantly living in
transformation. That there are not
really spiritual highs, I guess, but everyday in regular life we have opportunities
to dive deeper with God. I challenged
some of them to prayfully walk that out. For them to pray into existence whatever they desired from God. For example, that meant praying into
existence quiet times with God or divine interventions with people throughout
their day. We got to see a lot of them
really grow in their relationship with God. By the end of their time here they had a ton of testimonies about what
God had done.
This next
week I will be with the staff’s family in California until next week when we travel
back to the reservation for Hoops On The Rez and the skater group!
