My team and I arrived in La Paz, Bolivia five days ago. In case you are unaware like I was, La Paz is highest national capital in the world at 11,913 feet. It took us about eleven hours to get here from Arica, Chile, which is on coast, so our bodies underwent a significant elevation change over the course of that time. That drastic change left many of our bodies struggling to adjust. Many people dealt with altitude sickness, including headaches, nausea, and vomiting. It was rough.
It’s been a few days, and most of us are handling it better now, though some are now dealing with new health issues.
Now we are trying to get started with ministry, which is something we’ve been excited about since we found out what we would be doing our last week in Chile. We will be doing what the World Race calls “Ask the Lord,” or ATL (because we abbreviate everything). That means we don’t have an assigned ministry host or specified ministry this month. We’ve all been very excited about the chance to step out and trust the Lord to lead us and depend on him to show up.
I’ve been learning this year that often we don’t allow ourselves to actually need the Lord to act on our behalf, and that is why we don’t see more miracles.
Today, after spending the previous two days devoting our efforts to prayer and discussion about what we were hearing from God, two of my teammates and I set out to see what he had in store. And it was rough.
We prayed, and we walked. We didn’t feel any specific leading so we prayed some more. We talked with some people, but we felt defeated because we didn’t have a super-spiritual encounter with anyone.
I came back to our hostel, and later in the afternoon, I spent some time praying because I felt like that was something I could do for the city. As I was praying for our squad and for the city and the country, I felt like I heard the Lord speak two words into our situation.
“Altitude adjustment.”
Immediately, a podcast I had listened to in Swaziland came to mind. It was called, “Moving into Friendship with God,” and in it, Kris Vallotton talks about stepping into a new level of our relationship with God.
The central passage in his message talks is John 15. Verse 15 says, “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”
His point is that servants simply do what they’ve been told, and they don’t ask any questions. Friends, however, have the freedom to share thoughts and ideas and make plans together.
For the past nine months, we have been serving the Lord, but now he is taking us into a higher level of our relationship with him. He is inviting us to be friends with him, to figure out how to bring his Kingdom to earth together, instead of just being told what to do and how to do it.
As we learned a few days ago, traveling to a new altitude is an adjustment. For a while, there may be some discomfort as we adjust to this new height. But once we recover enough to look around, the view is beautiful up here.
My teammate Bekah had said earlier that she felt like we should just go about our day and do what we want and then embrace the interruptions that come. This is another truth I learned a while ago, “… we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16b). If we are truly seeking the Lord and desiring to do his will, he will either speak to us, or we can trust in the promise that we, as new creations, have his mind on the matter. We can step forward without fear, knowing that the Lord will correct us if we get off track, or speak to us along the way if there is something specific he has for us.
I can’t wait to share the way the Lord works this month as we step into this new level of trust and dependence and friendship with him. It may take some time to adjust, but I know that it is going to be beautiful.
