Every month our team gets assigned a new ministry, which usually involves working with a church or organization already established in the country. However, last month looked a little different for my team, as we were assigned ATL for ministry. For those who are unaware, as I was myself, ATL in terms of the world race is not short for Atlanta as I grew up knowing it, rather, it stands for Ask The Lord. This means we were not given a host. We were not given a specific ministry. Nor were we told where in Bulgaria to go. It was all up to us and how we felt the Lord leading us.
Seems cool right? I mean when else in my lifetime am I going to have the span of a month to wake up with essentially nothing on my schedule, and get to ask my Lord what He has in store for me that day? Realistically, probably never again. With this being said, the month of ATL was awesome in a number of ways, however, it also brought its challenges. One of these challenges was how to make good use of my time and my team’s time. I have never had a season of life with so little structure, with maybe the exception of summer breaks as a teenager and Lord (and my mom) knows I didn’t use that time wisely. So trying to figure out what to do when I technically had noting I needed to do was a challenge. Because unlike my unstructured time during summer breaks, I wanted to be able to look back at this time and see that I made good use of it, along with seeing fruit and growth as a result of it.
This led to another set of questions, what did I as an individual and what did we as a team want to come about as a result of this month. Our squad leader for last month, Carson, helped us tackle this question. As a result, we had a vision for ourselves as a team, along with ourselves as individuals.
At the end of the month we wanted to look back and see that each of us had grew in intimacy with God, as well as intimacy with each other. As far as outreach goes, we would rely on God to present opportunities for us.
Looking back on ATL in Bulgaria, I can confidently say we are able to look back and see the growth each of us experienced through intimacy with the Lord, along with the growth we experienced as we grew closer to one another as a team.
If I am being completely honest, we ended up not doing a lot of outreach ministry last month, and at times struggled with the notion of failing in this area. This notion was put to rest when I realized my growth in intimacy with the Lord and our team growing closer together as the body of Christ was the fruit from last month. I know God will use this fruit to further His kingdom throughout the rest of the race as well as the rest of my life.
With this being said, God did present a few really cool ministry opportunities, including making and handing out sack lunches to the homeless, prayer walking, and relational ministry. Relational ministry actually led to my favorite night of the entire world race so far. I will be writing my next blog about it! It involves God being faithful and creative, as well as two girls on my team making what was probably not the safest decision ever, but hey.. it all worked out great! And you are not gonna want to miss it!
Overall, I greatly enjoyed our ATL month in Bulgaria. I am super excited to see how the fruit from last month impacts the rest of the race!
