I’m sitting here by our family fire place with a nice cup of coffee and my it brought me back. I sat here, in almost the exact same place at the end of 2017, writing my very first blog for the World Race announcing my acceptance and all the hopes I had for this journey the Lord was leading me towards.
And what a journey it has been! This time last year, I was in Jordan at a small church with my team and we were gearing up to celebrate the New Year with popcorn, games, and worship.
I’ve been meaning to write this blog for ages, but in some ways it has been a challenge to write. It has always been a bit difficult for me to put into writing intimate experiences I’ve had with our Lord and then comparison always seems to add its own touches of hesitation, but not today haha.
These 3 short, little God stories impacted me so much and they are all for His glory and honor, not mine. So it’s my joy to share a few of my favorite testimonies from my Race:
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A Word Spoken and Gift Received
During our time in Kyrgyzstan, a few of my team members and I had the opportunity to share in a prayer night with local church leaders that we had actually met through a mutual connection in Kazakhstan. During the evening, my team was split up into small groups and were asked to pray and share any words of encouragement to the pastors who had come. It was incredibly humbling to be praying and speaking words of life over pastors nearly 30 years our senior who had been faithfully leading persecuted churches in Kyrgyzstan and the surrounding stan countries.
After I had prayed for one pastor, while my friend Landry was praying over him, I got this vivid picture in my mind of a woman resting, sorrowfully looking out a window of a tiny home at the garden outside. I got this idea that she was sick and looking out at the days when she could work in the garden. With a little prompting from the Holy Spirit, I asked our translator if I could pray for the man’s wife. As I said it, I glanced at his hands and there was no wedding band. “Lord was I wrong? Was this not from you? Did I fail?” Yet somehow there was a steadiness in my spirit, and I knew the Lord had something here.
The man’s eyes met mine and filled with tears, He said his wife was a believer and she had been sick. At some point, I learned he had taken his wedding band off while working outside. And I got to pray over his wife! I can still remember the joy in my heart praying that she would be comforted and the Lord would reveal with new encouragement the fruit of her life and her labors in the Spirit. I am so thankful to have gotten to share in this moment because I know at one point I would never have risked speaking up, my own fear and insecurity would have quieted the prompting and I wouldn’t have gotten to share in God’s goodness in this way.
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When God Hands You a Microphone
As a girl who is still coming around to public speaking and never enjoyed the poetry section of English class, you can imagine my reaction when my team wanted to do a Spoken Word night month 1 in Morocco. I literally had to ask what a spoken word even was. It is a really fun style of poetry that is memorized or read with great emotion in front of a group. Honestly they are quite powerful, but I mean I’d never written one before, much less performed one!
Well needless to say, I put one together and my whole team had a blast that night sharing powerful words of God’s faithfulness, of how addiction and depression bow at his feet, and even of funny quips about coffee. I didn’t think much of it, until my team was in Lebanon. We had been spending time at a local coffee shop. It was filled with artists who had in many ways been rejected by the Islamic community and again by the Christian community there for being gay or transgendered. Well as it would happen, on one of the nights we were there they were planning on an open mic night for spoken words and invited us.
After praying about whether or not to share a few members of my team, including me, showed up with our names on the roster. It was a powerful night! So many beautiful and creative pieces were shared. There were stories about eating disorders and abuse, but the common theme was either things were bad and they got worse or things were bad and I learned to accept them.
However, when my team members spoke the atmosphere shifted completely as we spoke of hardships, but shared bodly of hope. Whether directly or indirectly we spoke of the hope and peace we had found in Christ. And so I found myself there, in a tiny alley in Beirut holding a microphone and looking out over a crowd of faces that I had come to know, declaring with rhymes and tones the power of the one whose hands were pierced for me, all because of what God had started months earlier in Morocco.
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Jehovah-Rapha: Even of Little Toes
So picture this, my team is combined with 2 other teams in a giant house in Cyprus. It was our hosts home and there’s a giant story that goes with it, but for right now all you have to know is it was Halloween and we decided to play cutthroat mafia as a big group. If you’ve never played, well people turn the lights off and pretend to kill you, nuff said haha. Anyways, one of my friends Carla stubbed her toe really bad on the table. So much so, that even after the game she was still limping.
I felt a very distinct prompting in my spirit to go pray for her toe, but see this had been a sore subject between me and the Lord and I had been wrestling with Him on everything surrounding physical healings. In my hesitation, it so happened that another friend had the idea to pray for Carla’s toe, and so it was easy for me to walk over and join the group. She even asked me to pray first, and I did. A few others prayed and Carla was super grateful yet the condition of her toe hadn’t really changed.
The conversation had moved on, and I couldn’t help this thing in me that said to pray again. This time I asked if I could pray one more time. It was a short and simple prayer just declaring our Lord’s power and authority on earth as it is in Heaven. We moved on, and I was like well Lord I did it, in my heart.
That night as I was getting into my plush sleeping bag on the floor, Carla came over and with a smile told me her toe had no more pain and she showed me how she could bend it in the way she couldn’t before and thanked me for praying. That night I just sat there laughing and praising the Lord to myself. Obedience was by far the best choice, and He will use anything, even a little toe, to encounter us and demonstrate His goodness.
I love these stories! They were moments where the Lord prompted and in my obedience I got to usher and encounter His Kingdom in new ways that not only blessed me but those around me. Oh He is a good God! He is infinitely creative, and you never know how He wants to reveal His Gospel or share His love with those surrounding you.
There are thousands of stories of His goodness, and I could go on and on. Put any group of believers in a room and we could talk for hours of the ways God has demonstrated His love in our lives. He’s always moving and there is nothing that tops the power of His presence and intimate relationship, much less the greater narrative of hope we can share because of His Son.
Thanks so much for journeying with me on my World Race! Hope you had a great Christmas and wishing you a Happy New Year!
Blessings,
Bre
