Logistics Day– The day my over analytical/detail oriented side thrives and jumps for joy.
Logistics Day– the day my social/extroverted side cringes and longs for interaction.
McDonalds, aka Old Faithful, is my wifi hotspot of choice while overseas.
Not really, I’d rather be in a local coffee shop, but Ronald McDonald truly is Mr. Reliable when it comes to high speed internet.
This particular logistics morning was anything but ordinary.
Picture this with me:
It’s 9:30 am and my teammate and I choose to sit at different tables to do our work when we arrived roughly around 7:45 am.
–enter man in his late 30s, potentially early 40’s, who sits down at my table and asks, “is it okay if I sit here?” in Russian, to which I kindly respond, “sorry I speak English!”.
So he adds, “oh sorry!” and then repeats his sentence in English this time.
Me: I’m half awake, only three quarters of the way through my caffeinated beverage, begging for my first time of complete alone time in over a month. I quickly pick up my eyes and glance around the brightly painted red and yellow building symbolic of American obesity for the first time since arriving nearly an hour before.
There’s not a soul at any other table..
My defense mechanism quickly enters STRANGER DANGER mode.
This honestly doesn’t happen to me very often on the World Race. One of my favorite parts of ministry is talking to strangers on the street. But my half -awake/half-caffeinated self wasn’t prepared for this.
So I stumbled my way through awkward conversation of my trying to be as vague as possible about where I was working this month and what I was doing.
I mean seriously, you can’t blame me. He started his sentence with “I think I’ve seen you before!” (At this point I had only been in the city two days.. there was no way!!)
Long story short, his kids attended the school I was teaching English at and he was a local pastor. We talked for maybe 10 minutes before he went on his way, and I returned to receipting transactions.
About an hour later I’m approached by two women in their mid-30’s, again in Russian asking if they can sit with me, this time, without looking around at other tables I shrugged my shoulders (internally thinking “seriously?! Twice in one day?!”) and said sure.
I 100% wasn’t sure what they said but I was sick of saying “sorry I speak English” and decided, “why the heck not?!”
So we sat…
…In silence…
For like 10 minutes…
Upon their arrival I had just take out my journal and Bible to spend some time with Jesus, so I decided to continue this when the one of the women slides her phone across the table with a translation app similar to Google Translate open with some Russian changed to English.
But, the app hadn’t translated very well so I had no idea what she was trying to say. So I opened my phone to google translate where I had Ukrainian downloaded, and we spent the next thirty minutes communicating through technology.
What is life these days, that she can speak Ukrainian into the phone and it will translate to written English before my eyes?!
So as we began talking she was telling me that she was looking for work because she had two girls, ages 13 and 16 she was trying to take care of.
And longer we talked, the more the Holy Spirit was telling me to tell her how loved she was.
When I had opened my journal earlier as they first arrived, I accidentally came across my water color with the word “freedom” written on it, and in that moment, before her even speaking to me I felt like I was supposed to give it to her.
But I shrugged it off, thinking that it was me just trying to over spiritualize the situation.
So then as we conversed, the Holy Spirit kept promoting me to take it out of my journal.
So I did.
And through Google Translate I typed, “(…) I am so happy I met you both today. I want to give you this piece of paper. It says “freedom”. I feel like God wanted me to give it to you. I am learning how He created me to be free from shame in my past. He created me to be able to live in the freedom that His Son offered by dying on the cross. And so my prayer is that you can find freedom too!”
Pretty simple, right?
I slid the phone across the table along with the piece of paper with a verse from Songs 4:7 written on the back that says, “You are altogether beautiful, my darling, there’s no flaw in you”. And if you’ve ever read all the way through Songs, or know the context of it, you know that it’s quite an odd book to quote from, or much more give a random stranger at McDonald’s. I mean seriously, it can get a little awkward from time to time. But that’s the verse I felt like God wanted her to hear. So I held my breath, said a prayer that the Lord would be the Ultimate Translator in this moment, and finished journaling a sentence while she read it through.
As I glanced up, unsure of what I was about to encounter, I made eye contact with a woman, eyes full of tears.
It had resonated.
She mouthed the words “Thank You” as she cried.
It felt simple, but it was actually really profound for her.
So I grabbed the phone back and began typing, because Jesus wasn’t finished yet.
I explained to her that God wanted her to know that the way the author of the book of Songs cherishes and adores the woman he is writing about is the same exact way God feels about her.
Isn’t it cool how God works? He uses EVERY moment.
EVERY.
SINGLE.
MOMENT.
She sat down for what she assumed would be just another day at McDonald’s, but Jesus had so much more planned for her.
She didn’t just need a table to sit at, she needed the FATHER’S table to sit at. She needed commune with a fellow believer, to be encouraged, to be reminded that she’s a worthy daughter who is so loved and so cherished. And it just so happened that the ketchup stained booth served as the perfect table for fellowship.
What a beautiful reminder it was for me that not a single moment is wasted when it comes to ministry. Many of my most memorable ministry moments come from my “off days” when the Lord gently nudges me to remind me that life is about living every day missionally, and that He desires for us to live interruptible.
You see, God didn’t need me to be fluent in the language in that moment to give away truth to this woman. He needed me to step out in faith and trust that He would bridge the gaps, like He does time and time again. His word does not return void (Isaiah 55:11), and neither do His promises (Joshua 21:45).
Coming from a girl who’s insecurities tell her she’s not good at explaining things, I wasn’t really thrilled at the idea of trying to explain Song of Solomon to her, nor did I feel like I could adequately speak life into her via Google Translate. (If you’ve every used Google Translate, you know that it rarely translates accurately…)
But I went for it anyways.
Why?
Because we serve a God who is larger than any language barrier, larger than any miscommunication, and when He wants to reach His children, there’s nothing that will EVER get in the way of that.
He will ALWAYS chase after the ONE, no matter what it takes.
