We are professionals in glamorizing our experiences.
I have quickly noticed that individuals participating on the World Race sometimes can tend to leave out the ugly parts of their journey, ministry, or their genuine internal thoughts. This temptation to make it seem like this is a grand adventure with constant spiritual highs wrecks authenticity.
I can be tempted to do this too but I want my goal of this year to be genuine and true about what it is actually like to travel on international missions instead of what I want you to perceive. That would be me tampering with fully revealing all that the Lord is doing and the nitty gritty within this process if I only shared the highlights.
“I’m irritated today because I didn’t come on this to enjoy my time here without You, Jesus. Where is Your Spirit’s movement? I need to remember that this is the second day and my expectations are extremely high.”
This is a snippet of my journal where I woke up absolutely discouraged and confused as to why God has us here in Novi Sad, Serbia. When we arrived here, I wasn’t sure what to expect but without realizing it, I had expected enormous amounts of scheduled ministry. I still expected it this month even though the staff of AIM drilled into us to learn to not be a consumer of ministry but instead to learn to proactively create ripples in the communities by our own creativity.
We shouldn’t switch on and off our ministry switch but learn to keep it on always. I’m learning to not just show up to “ministry” but to walk in this mindset daily.
Our ministry host this month is Bera who is the pastor of Novi Sad Fellowship Church. When we asked him what we would be focusing on this month, he mentioned volunteering with youth on Sundays, Royal Rangers (AKA boy/girl scouts mixed with bible study) on Saturdays, speaking our testimonies in front of church, and helping him with two conferences.
Bera kept repeating to us that the goal he had for us was to build relationships with the community and share Jesus when opportunities arise. Be regular places, choose people to pursue in friendship, and be missional in everything you do.
Friendship evangelism.
I wasn’t understanding. I peeked at our calendar and saw blank space on the weekdays. My heart sunk thinking this would be a terrible month because there wasn’t something we were obligated to be at from 8AM-5PM.
I woke up the second day scribbling words about my frustration. Talk about impatience on my part, it was only day 2. The first day there wasn’t much opportunity to share the gospel and the entire month I was viewing as a failure because, honestly, it did not sound like people would be brought to me so I could chat with them about Jesus. I couldn’t simply walk into a classroom to teach every day and pour into the kids or be a part of a sex trafficking ministry where there would be a safe house of girls to talk with.
Here we were in a huge foreign city and I was grumpy that I wouldn’t be able to share with many about Jesus. That morning the Lord instantly captured my attention after I shared my exasperation with Him and He whispered things into my heart that I needed.
You need to learn how to genuinely love people rather than seeing them as your job.
I was reminded in that moment of a writing piece I read about what places truly need from missionaries,
“Our obligation or agenda might be to share the Gospel. But if we care to share the Gospel with people, and do not actually care about the actual people, we’ve got it all wrong! We’re nothing like Jesus. We ought to share the gospel with people because we love them, not the other way around…we know when we are just a number in your statistics of ‘people I shared the gospel with’.”
That hit. I wasn’t caring about the actual people but was caring about what I viewed as a successful month – sharing the Gospel with many and seeing transformation. Yet we cannot do that without loving them. My team would also need to step up and out in figuring out how to be creative and be innovators in how we reach people in these handful of weeks.
Our squad leader Lindsey asked us what passions and gifts we’ve been given because those will help guide us in how to touch people’s lives while we are here. I don’t know what we would have done without her this past week. She was right.
One of us lights up with youth and easily loves them well, one of us adores middle school aged girls, one is passionate about women’s ministry, one of us enjoys refreshing others by connection and service, one of us feels lead to visiting the rehab center the church partners with and leading public bible studies, and one of us is dedicated to prayer over the city. We have passions, we have goals, I wasn’t paying attention to them at the start of this month.
These are already starting to practically translate into our ministry for the month. A few of us were bold and silly jumping into a Zumba performance during a drug prevention gathering in the city center. The girls were around ages 5-16. Due to our silliness, the instructor invited us to come to Zumba for free and we are now loving on those girls. We plan to go to their Zumba class every week. They are inviting us to activities outside class and we plan to hold a girl’s day camp/retreat for them.
The youth are all over the place and are eager to spend time with us and we are now reaching our arms out back to them. We’ve reached out to a couple local humanitarians and missionaries here to see if we can visit and also serve them or with them in any way we can. Every Thursday we plan to attend a high school gathering/bible study again and this week we are part of leading it.
It was a slow lesson but I understand now. I now see an overwhelming amount of opportunities but it is my team’s responsibility to say yes and to make an effort to create an impact whether small or big. It all was a necessary change of perspective.
We are beginning to create ripples. I truly believe that now.
Please pray for those possible ministry opportunities that I mentioned and for the young people and missionaries that we hope to reach out to and continue investing in. Also, that my team could be bold and proactive to step up and out in order for these visions to become reality in Novi Sad, Serbia. We don’t just want good intentions but to follow through on what we feel God wants us to do.
P.S: MY BACKPACK ARRIVED FROM NORWAY! It’s also in one piece thankfully. Thank you so, so much for all the prayers! It’s been a week of learning to live on way less.
