First of all, my teammate Scott still needs some money to reach his December deadline! Please consider supporting him. Go to support-scott.org. He is a vital part of our team and he can’t go home.
Vietnam has been great so far. The Hungry Youngster’s job this month is to find Unsung Heroes in this closed country. We came into this month not really sure what to expect. We had been told to expect to not meet many people or be able to come up with future contacts for the World Race. After a couple days, Scott told us that he had been thinking that we should drop that expectation. So we did. Let’s just say that G*d shows up big time when you don’t have expectations.
The first week we did a little bit of research and pr*yer walked around the city and tried to figure out the city. We visited the Vietnam War Remnants museum which was very interesting to see the Vietnam side of the war. It was very one-sided but very informative. We also visited a pink Cathedral and Notre Dame. G*d is very present in this city considering it is a closed country.
We also googled different organizations and ch*rches in the area. I stumbled across one ch*rch that looked promising so we decided to go to it on Sunday. The pastor at this ch*rch is great. He is originally from Canada and has been the pastor of this ch*rch for the past two years. It is mainly an ex-pat ch*rch and right when we walked in we felt at home. It is a smaller congregation which I personally love and everyone there is so friendly. That Sunday we were bombarded with so many different people who are doing kingdom work in this city. Pastor Bob* gave us many emails and phone numbers of different people we could connect with to hear about the kingdom work they are doing in the area. We were able to go out to lunch with him and his wife and hear more about their story and what they are doing in the city. It was a great day overall and we were all completely blown away by how G*d completely blew our expectations out of the water.
On Tuesday we had a crazy day of G*d showing up. It started with pr*yer walking around the city. Earlier in the week we had seen a cafe that had the words “faith, hope, love” on the windows. We didn’t catch the name of it so Chase, Carli, and I decided to try to find it. Well, we failed during our pr*yer walk but found it later in the week. Anyways, Carli had googled faith, hope, love cafe and Grace cafe popped up. We decided that we would check that place out later in the afternoon. We showed up and discovered they were closed but we were able to talk with the owner and here one of the teams from our squad was working there this month. We had no idea, but G*d just led us there and we were able to hear about what they are doing in the city. The owner of the cafe told us about a CMA ch*rch that was really close so we ended up going and checking that out as well. The weird thing was that I had researched to see if CMA had a presence in Saigon and I couldn’t find anything, but then we ended up discovering that they are here. This church is HUGE! It is 7 stories tall and they have over 1,000 members. Tell me G*d isn’t present in this city because I’m pretty positive he is. So our crazy day continued after that. We had gotten invited to a small group that evening at a couple’s house. We had met them at ch*rch on Sunday. It was so great being in a real home and sitting on comfy chairs and couches and getting to talk about G*d with people who were around our age. We all felt so refreshed and encouraged. As we were leaving we ran into Marin, a girl from our squad. Here we discovered that they were living in that same apartment complex that we were just at for small group! So we got to catch up with that team and hear about what they are doing this month. It was just an overwhelming, great, G*d-filled day.
We have met so many other great people who are doing wonderful things in this city. We have a couple of meetings set up this week which is exciting for all of us. Even if they don’t turn into future contacts for the Race I know G*d is going to continue to do great things in these people’s lives. It has been great going into each day with an attitude of, “Ok G*d, this is your day and I will just let you lead me where you want me to go.” One thing we were told to do this month was to be willing to be interrupted. So that’s what we have been doing and it has been rewarding and refreshing.
Please continue to pray for our team as we continue seeking kingdom builders these next two weeks. It’s hard to believe that we only have two weeks left here and that we are almost finished with the first continent. Time is flying!
I hope all is well in America! Thank you for your support and love!
~Andrea
