Month 2.
Malaysia.
On October 1, our squad of 42 people landed in Kuala Lumpur (KL) from Manila,
and for the first time on the Race,
our teams all split in different directions.
My team of 7 girls were the first of our squad to do Ask The Lord (ATL) month.
Which means we weren’t given a place to stay or a ministry to work with, we have to Ask The Lord about all that…
At the airport, my team boarded a bus that whisked us away to Chinatown, KL. The unloading process on buses can be rather abrupt…our bus pulled left, parked, and the driver called for us in a foreign language to unload onto a cracked road, in the dark, without any guidance of where to go next, unless the rat I saw ran by was headed in the right direction. We each strapped our approximate 70lbs of baggage to ourselves, and looked at the images we had saved on our phones from Google maps the day before, arbitrarily choosing a direction to be North. We had no one else to depend on now, it was just us and God.
So off we walked, 7 Caucasian girls, new to downtown KL, in the dark, first in the wrong direction, then in the right direction, navigating through traffic, uneven sidewalks, homeless sleepers, locals who didn’t speak English, tourists of an array of accents but who were of no help, until we spotted a very small sign that read “Fernloft Hostel”. We ascended the stairs to a small air conditioned lobby; we had never known such relief knowing we had a safe place to sleep for the night, a place we could rest our packs, and our bodies.
But before I go any further into the stories of ATL month, here’s the introduction:
The night before in the Philippines, our team prayed together asking God to prepare for us a place to stay after the 1 night we had booked at our hostel. My teammate checked her email one last time before bed…
…and one email read that we could have our own apartment in Subang Jaya (a 45min train ride SW of KL) until mid-month. Cost – donation based.
Another email read that we were “blessed by God” because a YWAM team just cancelled and we could have their dorm for the second half of the month in Penang (a 5hr bus ride N of KL). Cost – cheap.
There was some legitimate screeching, laughter and jumping up and down that followed the reading of those emails… sorry to the men on our squad…but praise be to God, whether it be 12-yr-old-girl-fashion or not!
Ok so next. My teammate Meghan knows a girl who knows another girl – and this girls name is Kelsie. Kelsie picked us and our packs up from the Subang Jaya train stop the day after our KL hostel, and proceeded to show us the town we would live in, and our apartment: 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, air-con, WiFi, a kitchen, and our favourite thing – a kitchen table.
“And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life?” Matthew 6:27
“Seek first the kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Matthew 6:33-34
And thus begins our adventure in Subang Jaya, located in the province of Selangor, southwestern Peninsular Malaysia, in an apartment provided for by God, who answered our bold prayers in the Philippines.
Stay tuned…God’s just getting started….
