So, when I first came on the race I had expectations of what I thought the race would look like, and what I was going to be doing. I’ve heard the stories of people who have been missionaries for decades, and heard these amazing stories of the miracles that they had seen and all of these salvations that they witnessed. I was expecting my trip to look a lot like these great stories that I heard, but in all reality, it has not been like that at all. For the first month, my ministry was doing manual labor at a church, and the only interaction we had was with like three of the church members, so it was a bit of a wake-up call to me when I was out seeing all these great things that I had heard about. While working at this church we did a mixture of many things between pulling weeds, moving dirt and garbage, a lot of painting, and many things in between, but there were not any salvations or healings while we were there. I began to feel discouraged because I came half way around the world and was painting a mural on a church, but every day when we would see those three church members, their faces would light up, they would have huge smiles, and were so thankful for everything that we did at that church. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved working at that church, but it wasn’t what I had in mind for ministry at that time. This past week we had a debrief in Siem Reap to talk about how things went in month one things that were good, areas we could improve, and how our teams are doing. There was a lot of free time while we were there, and I started by using it like a vacation. Whatever I wanted to do, wherever I wanted to go, that’s what I did. As the week went on, we talked and someone pointed out that we were in an area where they spoke a lot of English and so it would be much easier to communicate to people here. We got to talk to some people about Jesus and prayed for some people, but no one converted to Christianity right there and we did not see any crazy miracles. One thing that we did see though is smiles and people just glad that someone would take time to stop and have a conversation with them. Through all of this God began to show me that I had my head in the wrong place. I shouldn’t be aiming at seeing all of these crazy miracles of be the one that “brings” someone to Christ. Those things might happen in missions, but that’s not the main goal of going out and doing missions work. The goal is to show the love of Christ to everyone. If I go through my whole life and no one experiences some crazy miracle right then or no one tells me that they want to be saved, so what? In the end, God gets the harvest. There must be someone that will plant the seed, some have to come and water, but in the end it’s all God. We are called to go out and love people, so first most that should be the thing we do. By painting at that church I might not have been doing anything crazy, but we were helping to empower the people at the church to go out into the town and minister. So by loving people at the church we were helping love people of Battambang. Instead of looking for these crazy signs, God is helping me to love the people that he loves.
