Hey all! 🙂
Some of you have been following my journey for the last 10 months and others are checking this out for the first time. So just to recap for you – I have been living in Pignon, Haiti and working for Many Hands for Haiti, an organization out of Pella, Iowa. I was helping with a program called Thrive for 5 and we had about 130 children (aged 0-5) in our feeding program five days a week. We focused on feeding, healthcare, and spiritual development. The mission of Many Hands for Haiti is to make God real in a broken world, and that they are doing. For more information on this organization you can check it out at www.mh4h.org and for more stories from my time in Haiti you can visit my previous blog at www.tampicobrown.blogspot.com.
I would like to say a huge thank you to all who said prayers for me at the end of my time in Haiti when I was dealing with kidney stones. I am past all of that now and am feeling a million times better. God was watching over me and I am so thankful for all of my faithful prayer warriors. It meant the world to me to have so many people praying for my health at such a scary time. That was a perfect situation to be reminded of God’s love and power to heal on His time, not mine. We serve such a wonderfully faithful God and He always comes through for us. I am excited to see more of His faithfulness as I continue to walk where He leads.
Haiti will always have a special place in my heart, but for the last four months I have felt God putting something different on my heart. I had been praying about this a lot and realized that God was asking me to go to some other places instead of staying in Haiti for another year. I have no idea what God has planned for 2015 but I do know that He is asking me to do the World Race. The WR trips go to 11 countries in 11 months and I couldn’t be more excited about this. I have to admit it’s a little nerve-racking because there are so many unknowns when visiting that many places in a year, but I know God is faithful. We serve a BIG God and He calls us to step out in faith and do BIG things in order to spread His word!
Last Sunday, Pastor Russell talked about how we serve a God who sees things. He sees when we need help, cares, and He wants to act in our lives. God loves to help people who know they can’t do it on their own. I know I couldn’t make it for 11 months in 11 different countries (so far from home) if I didn’t have God by my side to go through all of it with me. Pastor Russell also talked about how we should leave room for God to act in our lives. If we try to plan it all out and make sure it goes our way – there is no room for God to lead us. This is something that I was forced to practice in Haiti because every day we had unplanned things come up, but that was God’s way of showing us that His plan was better than ours. It is hard to give up control of our lives and let God lead our hearts and actions, but when we do life is so much better. God calls us to attempt things that are so big that they’re doomed to fail if He doesn’t step in. I want to live like that, where my faith is put to the test every day and I am constantly challenged and growing in my trust of the Lord.
I have been helping with Bible School in Spencer this week and it has been an awesome reminder of how great God is and how much He does for us. The lessons this week have been: God rescues us, God never leaves us, God helps us, God saves us, and God spreads His story. These are all so easy to relate to my time in Haiti and share what I have learned with the kids. I hope that they understand how much God loves us and how different our lives look when we choose to fully follow Jesus with all that we have and in all we do.
Thanks for taking time to catch up with me! 🙂
Love,
Heather
