At this very moment I’m sitting in a crowded ferry boat on a 4 hour ride to Komodo Island with my team. And when I say ferry boat, I mean a glorified rickety tug boat with a manual engine that’s holding about 40 people; supplies, luggage and all. Honestly I think this thing could capsize or break apart at any moment. But here we are, rocking side to side, shoulder to shoulder, over blue trash-filled waters just trying not to throw up on each other. If we are Facebook friends, I hope you read the post I shared from my teammate Emily about how we ended up with the decision to head to Komodo. But just incase you didn’t, here’s a recap!
Our time in Bali, Indonesia was a time full of awesome training on how to hear the Lord’s voice and also what ATL (Ask the Lord) ministry looks like. You read that right! We don’t always have a set ministry or ministry host everywhere we go. Sometimes (most times), we rely on ATL and pray into what God wants us to do each day. So when it came time for our squad to split up into teams, with 2 days until we left Bali, we were thinking now would probably be a great time to ask the Lord where He wanted us to go next! We spent time in prayer and regrouped and here’s what we got: pink sand, red flowers, a boat, three islands over, and wrong direction. We put the pieces together and got Komodo Island!
What?
We were so confused. We’ve heard from a few locals that Komodo Island can sometimes be a scary place to go with the jumbo sized dragons and all, but here we are, a team of all women, diving head first in the peak of monsoon season. This would be a first for world racers. We are essentially going in blind since this is total uncharted territory for us. But this is where God is leading us. We would later sit in a room, freak out a little bit, pray more, and unanimously decide we are saying yes to this. After we got our answer we ventured to a journal store a little ways from our hostel and struck up a conversation with a woman who we’ll call Maria. A sweet young (Christian!!) woman who has never ventured outside of Bali except for, you guessed it, Komodo Island! She kept insisting we had to go and told us there was a village there of about <2,000 people and provided us a contact of person we could meet there on the spot. COME ON JESUS.
So, after a delayed flight, a cramped hostel stay, an hour and a half flight, a hospital visit, and enduring the rest of this boat ride, we’ll be off to discover why God called us here. We should have missed our boat today. After getting off the plane one of our girls realized she had a double ear infection and we needed to go get her medicine! I thought for sure we missed it. But the captain of the boat specifically waited for us to get there. We piled 14 bags, 7 girls, and a driver into a car the size of an Equinox, and made our boat. It’s crazy to see what God can do when you give up complete control of everything. It’s been a wild ride so far. I’m already being stretched in ways I was in no way prepared for, but the Lord is taking me on this great adventure and the best and the worst part is that I have no idea what that looks like. It may not always be safe, but He is good.
