Welcome to Malaysia! Currently, half of our squad is on an island called Penang in Northern Malaysia. Yes. I live on an island. For this month, we are working at a homeless shelter in the city that serves breakfast and lunch as well as offers a bible study to anyone who might be interested. Our job is to help out wherever they might need it, which is mostly preparing the meals. However, I am completely useless in the kitchen. My main problem is that I get to impatient waiting for food to cook all the way through, which often leads to food that is cold in certain places, meat that might be a little to pink for comfort, and more often than not noodles that are hard. (You can ask my sisters, we have had some serious issues over the definition of al dente in our house.) So here’s the thing, I genuinely want to serve and love the people who come through those doors, not cause them to break a tooth on the pasta I make. So, I stayed out of the kitchen. Instead, my teammate Regan and I sat and welcomed people as they came in for breakfast. After a while, we got ushered into their bible study and starting singing songs praising God, but in Chinese. Have I learned Chinese since leaving? No. I am pretty confident the sounds I was making was not a single known language. After that, they went around the table and read verses from Luke 17. People got to ask questions about the verse and things that they didn’t understand and point out the things they found to be fascinating. And then we went around the circle and asked for people to pray over us. Here’s the thing, I believe in the power of prayer as much as the next person, but when I ask God for things, very rarely does it feel like life and death. But the people at this shelter needed their words to be heard by God because it was so serious. People at the shelter prayed bold, bold prayers. They trusted that God was good and going to be a provider. We talked that week about having faith like a mustard seed. Those folks had faith that could mountains. They had genuinely crazy faith. I hope to have faith like them one day.
