//
Month 1 of the world race is almost over. As I reflect on all the beautiful things God has done this month, I am literally blown away by all the possible things I could write about. So I am going to try to fit as much as I could on one blog and tie it all together. The story from my perspective begins with a work God began in me. For those of you who don’t know, I began the race with lots of fear. I was so crippled by fear that I almost didn’t even want to go. Of course, I had already fundraised all this money, so I was kind of forced to go, but my heart was screaming no!!!!!! I hate public speaking and I have always told myself that I couldn’t hold a conversation and so I dreaded going up in front of a group of people and preaching, sharing a testimony, teaching, or any combination thereof. Before we actually left the country at launch, our leadership spoke a lot about different fears many of us were feeling and how the love of God casts out fear. I really wanted that to be true, but I couldn’t help but still feel fear. In the past, during presentations, and during regular conversations I would freeze up, stutter, fumble through my words and bottom line I would make a fool of myself. Over the course of this month, God has utterly destroyed that fear in my heart and replaced it with confidence and Boldness.
It all began about a week after we arrived in Colombia and we had been doing ministry for a few days. Ministry was fun and I was enjoying the fact that God hadn’t asked me to preach. For a while it seemed like He probably wasn’t going to ask me to preach this month. We were a squad of over 40 capable and brilliant followers of God all of whom are on fire for Jesus. Surely, someone else on the squad could preach the few times we were actually called to… I was wrong. I can’t remember what day of the week it was, but I can remember the passage of scripture I read that morning. It was Exodus 3-4, the passage where God shows up as a burning bush and calls Moses to go to Egypt and liberate his people. Out of all the characters in the whole bible, I really believe I relate best with Moses. Like Moses, I was filled with fear due to my lack of skills with words. Like Moses, I fought with God when he asked me to take risks for his kingdom. Like Moses, I told God to find someone else to do the task without realizing God had already chosen me. And just like God liberated the Israelites through Moses, God was going to use me to liberate people for his kingdom. Not long after, I was asked by one of our squad worship coordinators to give a word or testimony in front of the whole squad.
God doesn’t speak to us without asking us to apply what he teaches us. Though I wanted to say no with every fiber of my flesh, I said yes because it is not my will that needs to be done, but it is the will of my Father. I preached on the very passage of scripture that I had studied earlier that day. It wasn’t much of a word, about 10 minutes in length, and I did it in front of most likely the most supportive audience I could possibly have delivered a speech in. However, it was still a huge leap of faith for me. I let go of what everyone else thought of me at that moment. I realized I already had the approval of the most important being in the universe, God himself. I realized he loved me exactly as I was and that all that power was for me. Nothing could touch me because I belonged to God. Even if I made a complete fool of myself, it would have brought glory to God because I was obedient to God’s instruction.
From that night on, I felt a boldness I had never experienced before. I feel like for the first time, I had the freedom to be myself. For so long, I was so worried what everyone thought that I believe part of me was suppressed. I have never shared the gospel as much as I have this month and I have never “made a fool out of myself” as much as I have this month. If you haven’t “made a fool of yourself” recently, you should try it. It is one of the most liberating thing you could do. The bible says “God chose the foolish things of this word to shame the wise”(1 Corinthians 1:27) and I have seriously seen this reality come alive in my life. Another example of how God used my weakness was a couple of Fridays ago. Our entire squad went to a school to teach them about the power of words, identity and purpose, and drugs, sex and alcohol. I gave a talk about the power of words. I was again nervous about presenting to this group of high-schoolers who I assumed would just be totally uninterested in what I had to say. I was wrong. Apparently, by the time I had finished my talk, one of the girls in the class was so affected that she was in tears. One of the girls in my group who gave her talk on sex, drugs and alcohol spent the whole time just comforting the girl and inviting her to church the next day for youth service. She came and shared her story the next day with yet another girl in our group the next day and she gave her life to Christ!!! My talk was about how words I believed in my head were so powerful that they paralyzed me from doing anything God called me to do. I was living life trapped in a box and I couldn’t get out until I looked at what scripture said and stopped believing the lies and started believing the truth of God’s word about who God said I was. In the same way, this girl had been believing an assortment of lies that her family had told her all her life and last weekend she was liberated from that. Just as God had told me he would do earlier in the month. God is not a liar. When he tells us through him, that “we will do greater things than these” (John 14:12-14), he is not lying or giving some sort of hyperbole. He has given us his Holy Spirit in our lives and it is about time all the lies I have ever believed about myself are dispelled and replaced with God’s truth.
We are leaving Colombia in 2 days and I would really love it if you all subscribed to not only my blog, but also the blog of my 5 teammates. Many of our stories are going to be interconnected in the coming months and it would be really cool if you guys read not only my blogs but theirs as well to get a full picture of what God is doing at each of our ministry sites. As always, thanks for reading and supporting me through your prayers and finances and pray that God continues to bless the work of the ministries we are partnering with.
