ATL? What does that mean besides the abbreviation for Atlanta? That’s a great question because ATL is something I haven’t taken the time to talk about over the course of this experience.
ATL is an acronym for “Ask The Lord”. Okay, that’s interesting. So… how does this relate to Ghana?
Well, yesterday, I told you all that Ghana felt like it lasted forever. The reason being we literally spent two months there instead of one. We lived in this country for both month five and month six of our journey, and six of the eight weeks were dedicated to our living together as a squad in Sunyani. After those initial six weeks we were told to separate into our teams for the last 2 weeks of June, and we were to ask the Lord (ATL) where He wanted for us to go, to lead us to the people He wanted us to meet.
Sounds scary, right? Well, whether it sounds scary to you or not, it definitely was for me. My fear, however, surrounded the fact that I was the team leader and was supposed to be leading my team into this strange new way of following Holy Spirit. If it were just myself, I would have been fine. Should mistakes be made, I would really be the only one affected by those mistakes, so no worries. But as a team leader, should I lead them into something that was misheard, it would affect many.
There are a few lessons Ghana, in general, brought about that I did not mention yesterday. During these two months God was teaching about two main topics:
- The importance of the different gifts within the community, or body, of Christ
- The importance of letting go of my control in all circumstances and bringing concerns to Him in prayer, trusting that He will take care of whatever needs I, and my friends/family/acquaintances have
For the second one, God and I had a pretty intense conversation about this at the end of Côte d’Ivoire – that He wanted me to start taking things to Him in prayer. His literal words to me were “Denea, I hear your words.” This phrase is significant. He said it that way specifically because of an insecurity I have surrounding my ability to communicate clear messages with my words. It’s easy when I’m typing something. I can write, read, edit, reread, edit again, etc. But with spoken words… I can’t take any of that back, and sometimes what I’m trying to say isn’t what everyone else hears. It’s also how I know the whole “preaching the Word” thing is from God because communicating in a way that others understand is not my natural gift. It’s something I would consider to be a weakness that I constantly have to practice at to get better.
Anyway, so God told me to start praying to Him more and giving things to Him. He told me to just watch and trust Him, and that He would prove to me that He hears my words. So, I started doing just that, and in Ghana He showed Himself faithful. My trust began to build, and this is where we will roll back into the ATL stuff…
So, I’m afraid of how this is going to roll with my team, but I’m trusting that God is going to show Himself faithful… because that’s what He’s been showing and teaching me.
I called a team time, and my team came together to spend some time doing a listening prayer to ask the Lord where He wants us to go. After several minutes sitting in silence and waiting, I asked them what they heard, and then it got interesting:
Josh said he saw an image of a blue house and tents. Johnny said he felt like we needed to go north. One of the girls felt like we needed to be in a village, another saw an image of a pyramid. Someone else said they felt we needed to go East.
And with all the random things being thrown at me, though I don’t think I ever told my team about it, I was freaking out on the inside. I had no idea what any of this meant… if anything! And had no idea what to do.
After discussing things for a while, and trying to figure out what all of these random, seemingly non-related things had to do with each other, we decided to go North to a city called Tamale, and trust that the Lord would make sense of it all. Regardless of what happened, there are always people we can share the Gospel with.
Off we went to Tamale, and when we arrived at the bus station with some of the other teams (most teams decided to go North because we were going to have to meet up there to reunite for the next country), things got even crazier. None of us had arranged to stay anywhere. We trusted that the Lord was going to direct us to where we should go even for that. Our budget is quite small, especially when it comes to lodging, so this was honestly going to require a lot of faith.
While trying to figure things out at the bus stop, one of my teammates, Josh, found some mormons in the parking lot and struck up a conversation with them. We’ll get back to this later. In the meantime, members of one of the other teams walked into a convenience/grocery store on the other side of the parking lot and happened to run into another American citizen in this random Ghanaian town. Her name is Kelsey, and they found out that she was a missionary staying in Ghana for a few months at a missions base in another town called Yendi that was further east. The guy who runs the base, a Ghanaian man named Pastor Mustafa (Moose), was with her, and Kelsey introduced my squad mates to him. Turns out he runs a pretty big ministry in Yendi, and his base had enough housing to take up to 100 people if need be. He frequently houses teams from all over the world, and offered to take as many of us as there were who felt like joining him. Cost would not be a problem. He would make sure our budget was not exceeded.
Whoa! So, they came out and told the remaining team leaders what this guy said, and asked if any other teams felt they should go.
Okay, so let’s recap:
– During listening prayer, one of my team members felt like we should go North.
– Another team member felt like we should go East.
– A random stranger who has a missions house both North and East of where we were originally staying in Sunyani is met at a convenience store outside the bus stop we were just dropped off at.
I called my team together so we could consult about this, and this is when I learned about what Josh was doing with the Mormon guys. During his conversation with these guys he told them what we were doing on this crazy thing called The World Race. He told them we were looking for a place to stay and asked if they had any recommendations. Well, it turns out the head of whatever Mormon branch these guys were under owns a hotel in Tamale. He told us to call the guy if we needed a place to stay, and let the owner know that he referred us to him. He ensured us that the guy would work with whatever budget we had.
OH no… so now we have another option! What to do??
I walked away for a moment by myself, starting to freak out on the inside again, but trying desperately to trust the Lord. After the little breather, I felt a total peace about following Pastor Moose to Yendi. So, I told my team that was the decision, and off we went… North and East.
As we left, I received a message from one of the other team leaders asking if we had information about a place where they could potentially stay. Hmmm… well, I have this random Mormon guy that offered a potential solution, right? So, I sent her the info, and what do you know… God took care of another team.
Our time in Yendi was honestly pretty great! Pastor Moose paid for all of our travel expenses out of his own pocket. At the mission house, we had beds. Optional hot water for showers! Street food and markets within walking distance! He arranged for us to have meals while there and negotiated prices to make sure everything was within our budget.
There were so many options for ministry. He was the director of multiple schools in the town, so we had the option of working with children. There was an expansion being done on one specific school, so we had the option of doing manual labor. He was connected with many of the chiefs of local villages – like mud hut villages – and we could go spend some time out there!
Okay, back to listening prayer and ATL. And here we go again…
I’m really feeling like we should work with the teachers at the school, says one person. I’m really feeling connected to the construction guys, says another. I feel we should go to the villages and build relationships with those people.
Oh man… even though He’s been showing Himself to be faithful, I’m still struggling with the whole trust-that-He’ll-make-it-all-make-sense thing, and I’m becoming exhausted with being the decision maker.
Plus, there’s still the Need for Approval thing that I’m working on, and the thought of not being able to make everyone happy, especially since we’re supposed to be working together as a team, was stressing me out.
Okay, Denea, one more time – just ask the Lord to be your wisdom and make a flipping decision!
So, my decision was a compromise. We would spend the first half of the two weeks working at the school. Those who wanted to help the teachers could do that, and those who wanted to do the construction could do that. The second half of our two weeks would be spent focusing on a village.
Not everyone was happy with that decision at first, and I struggled with that, but it all ended up working out.
We did our construction work, then we actually ended up deciding to move into a village for the second half of our time in Yendi. The chief of the village offered us his best building to stay in, which was actually concrete instead of mud. Guess what color it was painted? That’s right… blue. And guess what we did in order to keep the mosquitos from eating us? We set up our tents in the building to help protect us from the mosquitos while we slept.
– A blue house and tents in a village –
This was Africa. The Africa I wanted to experience. It wasn’t the dry flatlands with zebras and giraffes, but it was a mud hut village where we used cockroach infested squatty potties, and I could set up my ENO (a hammock brand) at night and watch the huge, bright African stars.
There’s a blog I wrote about a man we encountered while there. It’s titled, From Wence He Came.
Go check it out!
In the meantime, be encouraged to trust the Lord even when it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes we just have to move and He will make sense of what we don’t understand. It’s called faith. The substance of things hoped for…
