When we hopped on our first plane headed for India, none of us thought that we would be spending July loving on people in Thessaloniki, Greece… Wow! God is so cool and creative! We feel so incredibly loved because of all the amazing people we have ALL OVER THE WORLD praying for us and supporting us. There are people we have never even met who are praying specifically for personal and ministry related needs! It’s such a blessing to see the (capital C) Church being lived out, and we want to say a huge “Thank You” to each and every one of you who has been a part of and has enabled this journey!
One of the ways that AIM does ministry on the Race is through equipping and sending racers out to practically seek the Lord in ministry. One specific way that AIM trains racers to do this is by assigning a specific type of ministry called “Ask the Lord,” or ATL ministry. At our Month 6 Debrief, we were given a chunk of time and told to literally go ask God what He wanted to do with our 7th month of that Race. We asked the Lord EVERYTHING. We asked the Lord where He wanted us to go. Our options were wide open. Our only guidelines were to not go back to Albania, and not to go to Montenegro or Bulgaria. That’s it.
When we asked the Lord where He wanted us this month, we heard Him calling us to Greece. However, we didn’t want to be that team that was going to Greece for their ATL (eye roll). We wanted to make sure that we were going because that was really where they Lord was calling us, and not because that was our fleshly desire. But in our time spent in prayer, the Lord led us to ministry in Thessaloniki. We quickly realized that stereotypical “Honeymoon Greece” and actual “Everyday Thess” are very different.
Here’s a snapshot of what people THINK when they hear Greece…
Here’s a snapshot of what we SEE when we walk out of our apartment here in Thess…
Once the Lord revealed to us where He wanted us to stay this month, we asked Him what we were supposed to actually do. We felt the Lord call us into serving the homeless and abandoned population here in Thess. Once we established this broad vision for the month, we were able to begin to dive into the “daily asking + trusting” that is so necessary during ATL (and life as a whole, let’s be real).
So what does this whole ATL thing mean in practice? It means that trust and ask the Lord to guide us through each day. We ask the Lord to give us a prompting on where to buy our coffee, who to talk to, and what to pray for. ATL is truly a great ministry for us at this point in the Race because we are past the halfway point. Many of us have started thinking about what life is going to look like when we get home. This ministry is an opportunity to practice living missionally regardless of location; we get to see what it looks like to put all these concepts that we learn on the Race into practice in ways that we can continue when we get back to the States. We get to practice everything we have learned up to this point by listening to the Holy Spirit. This month, we get to “just do life” and ask the Lord to lead us into daily ministry opportunities.
The Lord gave us the vision of providing the simple needs of the people around us: giving bread to the homeless, bringing flowers to the widows, and spreading joy to the public through public worship. These are just a few of the things that the Lord shared with us. However, we have little to no budget to do so. This is where we need your help. We need to be able to buy bread, poster board for ‘free hugs’ and ‘free prayer’ signs, flowers, someone’s coffee, etc. Could we use personal funds? Yes, we could. However, we felt God calling us into a month of discomfort and part of that is having to ask for money… AGAIN. So we have set up a GoFundMe account as a platform through which you can help us supplement our World Race budget. We will be pulling from the account at specific intervals and distributed to the team to use for ministry as we are led. Please be aware of what this money is NOT going towards: our own food budget, our lodging, our personal adventure days, etc. We are asking you to provide Christ’s love to the people here in Thessaloniki. We are simply the vessels. Below is a link to the GoFundMe page we will be using as our platform.
https://www.gofundme.com/atl-provisions?lang=en-US
Thank you so much for prayerfully partnering with our team this month. Stay tuned for more information and stories about what the Lord is doing this month!
