Y’all it blows my mind when the Lord answers prayers and we don’t thank him for it because we don’t notice that he was answering it! Long story short… that was me the first week we were here.
Last month was an amazing month with so much growth and fellowship and building relationships, and to be honest it was exhausting after we left just thinking of how many things we had done. So going into this second month I had prayed that God keep the momentum going into this month, but that he gave us more time for rest.
On our second official day of doing ministry here in Romania we had no idea what we were going to be doing. Our team was split into two groups and Nettie and I were going to be working with the same people that we had worked with the first day. When asking what we were going to be doing for ministry this day (we had done children’s ministry the first day) our ministry partner said, “It is not very exciting, you will be cracking walnuts.”
Walnuts? For ministry? For 4 hours? Yes y’all, cracking walnuts. I was kind of confused and was thinking “we raised all this money to crack walnuts?”
While heading to the house Nettie asked, “What ministry do these walnuts contribute to?” and our ministry partner stated that walnuts are expensive here and they grow them, crack them, and then sell them to help pay for different ministry projects. Okay, cool I can live with the fact that it isn’t just busy work, but it was hard to feel like it wasn’t busy work at first.
Once we got to the house and start cracking walnuts our ministry partners husband brought us coffee, biscuits, tootsie rolls, put on a sermon, and we got to work. As I’m sitting there thinking about how nice it was to be in a warm home just calmly cracking walnuts God just does the thing he does best and says something to the effect of:
You ask for rest, I give you rest.
I give you rest, but you complain.
….
Lets just say I felt so dumb at that moment. This was what I had asked for this month and I complained about it. God says come to me and I will give you rest!
But now you are probably thinking, “who has time for rest these days?!” and rest is such a hard thing for us at times because we feel like rest is such a negative thing in our society. We live in a work hard, play hard, crash hard society (Amy Heitzman quote) so we don’t take the time to actually rest, NOR do we even try to figure out the best way we find rest, because rest doesn’t always look like taking a nap or sitting on the couch watching a movie, if that is how you find rest awesome, but there are also so many other ways to find rest.
For me, I find rest by painting.
For Jonathan, he finds rest in being outdoors and exploring nature.
For Dani, she finds rest in having deep conversations.
For Chelsea, she finds rest in solving her Rubik’s cube.
For Janele, she finds rest on a picnic blanket.
Rest is spending time being recharged by the things that you find joy in, find the Lord in, and are able to be refilled in. Finding rest is not a bad thing. Finding rest is a gift from the Lord. The Lord delights in us taking the time to find him, as well as find time for ourselves.
Prayer requests:
Please pray for our last week in Romania that we will use our time wisely.
Pray for our team as we continue to work on finding rest while living in community and having busy schedules.
Pray for each team as we prepare to head into our first month in Africa
Praise reports:
Everyone that was sick is now feeling better
No one else has gotten the virus
My stomach hasn’t hurt in a few days
We have seen people come to know Christ this month
