ATL (Ask the Lord)
This month my team and I have no ministry host, no given contacts, and no set ministry. We are doing what Adventures calls ATL, asking the Lord for direction and discernment on where to go and what to do.
Honestly, it was a little intimidating at first. I’ve realized on the race, I am sometimes a planner. Or at least, I like to have an idea of what is going to happen so I can prepare myself for what is to come.
But I have realized how big our God is, and how He has such a hand in everything we do in life.
Towards the end of last month, my team and I sat down and had intentional time asking the Lord what He had for us during our time in Indonesia. We prayed about a certain city to go to, what ministry could look like, and anything else He wanted for us during our last month on the Race.
Afterwards, we talked about what we heard from the Lord. It was really beautiful how the Lord had laid similar things in each of our hearts. We felt like the Lord was asking us to minister to locals and tourist along the beach. To spend a couple days in a place, and have intentional, relational conversations with the people that we meet. Basically we were going to beach hop to get to our final debrief location in Bali.
The two men on my team joined back up with the whole team, since they had been on their own team for manistry month. As we sat around the table we talked about our options for the month, and came to the conclusion that we weren’t going to have a plan for the month, and just going where we felt the Spirit led us. And we all had so much peace about not having any plans. Honestly I was still slightly anxious, even though I had peace about it all.
We were just going to start in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. The team and I had a plan of spending a day or two there, asking people where to go in Indo, and spending intentional time in prayer seeing if the Lord was leading us to any certain place.
That Sunday, we decided to go to a church and meet up with our connections in the city, through team testify. We were given the phone number of people that were associated with the IHOP (International House of Prayer) in Jakarta. They invited us to join them at church, and to share their heart for indonesia and their ministry.
We got to spend the day with incredible women who are on fire for the Lord. They loved on us, showed us amazing indonesian food, and told us the do’s and don’ts of Indo. We could have easily thrived working with this ministry, and partnering with these people. It would have been a place for each person on the team to use their passions towards ministry. But we knew this wasn’t where the Lord has called us.
We sat down as a team, spent some time in prayer, and re-evaluated what the Lord had asked. We came back to beach ministry. So we googled some things, and ended up booking the cheapest flight for Bali, leaving the next day.
Little did we know, how much of an impact this divine encounter with the people in jakarta would have on us, and the connections that would come from this. The people that we had met a couple days earlier had connected us to the Bali house of prayer.
That Friday night, we joined the BHOP (Bali House of Prayer) for their weekly house church. And I was reminded all over again of the Lord’s faithfulness, and how much He has a hand in every aspect of our lives. My team and I were welcomed into the incredible community that has been established here in Bali. We got to sit around the living room, share testimonies of the Lord’s faithfulness, hear the increible things that He is doing in the lives of the people here, and spend some increible time interceding for the people, Bali, and the Lord’s will to be done here.
As I sat in this living room, the thing that I kept thinking was how cool the Lord is. He had joined people from different nations, backgrounds, and stages of life to this one room, where we could all worship the same God.
It reminded me again of how community can look so different than we could have every imagine. That community is what you make it to be, and the only thing that really matters is that Jesus is the center of what you are doing. It doesn’t matter what the schedule has to look like, the music that you play, the environment you create, or the people that are there. Literally the only thing that really matters is that Jesus is glorified above all.
