Wow month 7!! Here we are! Who would have ever thought we could have gotten here so quickly?? But here we are feeling confident and so incredibly loved because of all the amazing people we have ALL OVER THE WORLD praying for us and supporting us. There are people we have never even met who are praying specifically for personal and ministry related needs!! How cool is that! Literally the church in practice! Thank you to each and every one of you who has been a part of and has enabled this journey!
One of the ways AIM does ministry on the race is equipping and sending racers out to practically seek the Lord in ministry. Now, you might ask, “Don’t you do that anyway?” and my answer to that would be “Absolutely!”. One specific way that AIM trains racers to do this is by assigning a specific type of ministry called “Ask the Lord,” or ATL ministry. We asked the Lord EVERYTHING. We asked the Father where he wanted us to go. Our options were wide open. Our only guidelines were to not go back to Albania, and no to go to Montenegro or Bulgaria. That’s it. From there, we asked the Lord to give us a vision for daily ministry. Some teams felt the Lord calling them to go work with refugees, and some felt the call to tourist ministry. In those broad visions for the month, we trust and ask the Lord to guide us through each day. We ask the Lord to give us a prompting on where to buy our coffee, who to talk to, and what to pray for. We did something like this back in Nepal and it was amazing! This month it is just on a more comprehensive scale. ATL is a great ministry for us at this point in the race because we are past the halfway point. Many of us have started thinking about what life is going to look like when we get home. This ministry is an opportunity to practice living missionally as a lifestyle like we would back home. We get to practice everything we have learned up to this point by listening to the Holy Spirit. This month we are going to “just do life” and ask the Lord to lead us into daily ministry opportunities.
When we asked the Lord where he wanted us this month, we felt called to Greece. However, we didn’t want to be that team that was going to Greece for their ATL (eye roll). We wanted to make sure that we were going because that was really where they Lord was calling us, and not because that was our fleshly desires. But in our time spent in prayer, the Lord led us to ministry in Thessaloniki. As a quick disclaimer, here is what people think of when they here Greece contrasted with what we are actually experiencing. These are real pictures outside our apartment/hostel.
What people THINK when they hear Greece…
What we ACTUALLY see in Greece… 
The Lord gave us the vision of providing the simple needs of the people around us: giving bread to the homeless, bringing flowers to the widows, and spreading joy to the public through public worship. These are just a few of the things that the Lord shared with us. It turned out to be a more difficult vision that we anticipated. We had a difficult time finding anywhere in budget to stay. Greece was taken off our route originally because it has become too expensive to send teams there. This is where we need your help.
We have been called to provide for those around us. But we have little to no budget to do so. We need to be able to buy bread, poster board for ‘free hugs’ and ‘free prayer’ signs, flowers, someone’s coffee, etc. Could we use personal funds? Yes, we could. However, we were called into a month of discomfort and part of that is having to ask for money…AGAIN. So we have set up a GoFundMe account as a platform through which you can help us supplement our World Race budget. We will be pulling from the account at specific intervals and distributed to the team to use for ministry as we are led. Please be aware of what this money is NOT going towards: our own food budget, our lodging, adventure things, etc. We are asking you to provide Christ’s Love to the people here in Thessaloniki. We are simply the vessels. Below is a link to the GoFundMe page we will be using as our platform.
Thank you so much and if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment or email me!
I love you guys!!
Love and peace,
Keeley
