Wow month 7!! Here we are! Who’da thunk we would be here so fast?! But here we are feeling confident & so incredibly loved because of all the amazing people we have ALL OVER THE WORLD praying for & supporting us. How cool is that! Literally the church in practice. Thank you to each & every one of you who has been a part of this journey!!
One of the ways AIM does ministry on the race is by sending racers out to practically seek the Lord in ministry. Now, you might ask, “Don’t you do that anyway?” and my answer to that would be “Absolutely!”.
One specific way that AIM trains us to do this is by assigning a ministry called “Ask the Lord,” or ATL. That’s what this whole month is about.
No assigned ministry.
No assigned host.
No meals prepared for us.
We trust the Lord to provide EVERYTHING. It’s a literal moment-by-moment walk!
We start by sitting down as a team and asking the Lord where He wants us to go. From there, we ask the Lord to give us a broad vision for ministry (e.g. Syrian refugee camps, tourist ministry, street evangelism). With these broad visions for the month, we trust and ask the Lord to guide us through each day. We ask the Lord to prompt us on where to buy our coffee, who to talk to/pray for and how to pray over the country or city we are in.
ATL is a great ministry for us at this point in the race because we are past the halfway point. Many of us have started thinking about what life is going to look like when we get home. This ministry is an opportunity to practice living missionally as a lifestyle like all believers have whether we are on the mission field or living daily life in the states. This month we are going to “do life” and ask the Lord to lead us into daily ministry opportunities.
SOOOOOOO
When we asked the Lord where he wanted us to go this month, we felt called to Greece. Yes, Greece. Dont stop reading yet! Haha
We didn’t want to be that team that was going to Greece for their ATL (eye roll). We wanted to make sure that we were going because that was really where the Lord was calling us, and not because that was our fleshly desires. But as we continued to spend time in prayer we felt the Lord leading us to ministry in Thessaloniki.
Disclaimer: here is what people think of when they here Greece contrasted with what we are actually experiencing.
What people THINK when they hear Greece (thanks google!)
What we see in Greece when we step out of our hostel…
The Lord has given us the vision this month of providing the simple needs of the people around us:
giving bread to the homeless.
buying coffee for someone.
paying for someone’s meal in a restaurant.
bringing flowers to the widows.
spreading joy to the public through public worship
These are just a few of the things that the Lord shared with us. It turned out to be a more difficult vision than we anticipated. We had a difficult time finding anywhere in budget to stay. BUT the Lord provided a more than adequate place with beds, a roof over our heads and even a kitchen so we can prepare our meals & stay in World Race food budget! WOOHOO!! Greece was originally taken off our route because it has become too expensive to send teams here.
This is where we need your help.
First, please join us in prayer as we seek to allow the Holy Spirit to lead us rather than our flesh.
Second, we have been called to provide for the practical needs of these people in hopes that it opens the door for us to share with them their deeper spiritual need of a relationship with Jesus Christ. But we have little to no budget to do so. We want to be able to buy bread, poster board for ‘free hugs’ and ‘free prayer’ signs, flowers, someone’s coffee, someone’s meal etc.
Could we use personal funds? Yes, we could. However, we were called into a month of discomfort and part of that is having to ask for money…AGAIN. So we have set up a GoFundMe account as a platform through which you can help us supplement our World Race budget. We will be pulling from the account at specific intervals and distributing to our team to use for ministry as we are led.
Please be aware of what this money is NOT going towards: our own food budget, our lodging, adventure things, etc. We are asking you to help us provide Christ’s love in a tangible way to the people here in Thessaloniki. We are simply the vessels.
Below is a link to the GoFundMe page we will be using as our platform.
https://www.gofundme.com/atl-provisions?lang=en-US
Thank you so much and if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment or email me! 🙂
