I officially made it to Launch!
We leave for Malaysia tomorrow, around 3. Overall, it should take us about 2 days to get to our ministry site.
My team will be working with a church in Sungai Petani, Kedah, Malaysia. I’m not sure exactly what our ministry will look like, but it sounds like there might be a lot of worship involved. The church is currently working on making a record, so I very well may be an international recording artist by the end of September, no bid deal.
Launch has been similar to training camp, which has made it a little harder to believe that we are really about to go travel to 11 countries in 11 months doing mission work.
One of the activities every team did was a treasure hunt. I had never done anything like it before, but neither had most of my team, so it was a group learning experience.
Basically, the idea is that you really have no set plan of attack, you are just going out and relying on God to tell you where to go, who to talk to, and what to say.
We started by each having an individual listening prayer. We just prayed that God would reveal words, pictures, or just anything to us to give us direction. You really have to be willing to look like an idiot, because you hear some crazy things. You also have to have faith that what you’re hearing is coming from God.
We all shared, and here is what some of our list of words looked like:
- Gene, Jean, or Jene
- purple tree
- lady
- curly hair
- bird
- water
- triangle
- orange
- encouragement
Yeah, it makes absolutely no sense!
So, we blindly went outside of our hotel and walked wherever we felt led to go. Our team ended up viewing most of our ‘clues’ as checkpoints. The bird could mean airplane, or airport, which isn’t surprising since we are 15 minutes away from O’Hare International.
At times it seemed like we were on a wild goose chase, stretching to make connections with what we heard and what we were actually seeing. We even asked a couple of men if their names were Gene, no such luck.
After about an hour we headed back to the hotel. Nothing profound had happened, but it was definitely a fun experience and a nice introduction to the idea of prophecy.
Well, shortly after all of this Heith, my teammate had a crazy confirmation for all of us!
He was in the elevator talking to a girl he knew from another squad and there was also another guy in the elevator. Heith introduced himself and the guy said his name was Gene! How crazy is that!
I realize that all of this could be explained away as one major coincidence, but I’ve never been one to believe in coincidence. I also think the odds of finding someone named Gene so soon after our exercise is HIGHLY unlikely!
That morning I had been reading in 1st Corinthians about spiritual gifts and prophecy:
If an unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everybody is prophesying, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged by all and the secrets of his heart will be laid bare. So he will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, ‘God is really among you!’”
-1 Corinthians 14: 1, 3, 4b, 24, 25
I really think prophecy is going to play a major part in the coming year and I'm really excited for it!
