For the past year that I’ve been traveling around the world I’ve been in countless churches and worshipped in so many languages from Asia, Africa, and then on to Central and South America. This is something I’ve wanted to specifically write about and what it’s meant to me.
Up until last year my only experience and way I connected with the Lord has been within the walls of the American church. So to have the opportunity to see him in such vastly different ways then I have ever experienced before has been something I think I will be processing for the rest of my life.
Trying to even find the words as to the ways it’s impacted my life is even hard as I type. I remember my first church experience (of many) overseas last October, the first month of my own World Race journey, in the Philippines. I remember I found myself weeping, it was tears of fear and tears of surrender. Fear of Lord, how am I possibly going to feel you outside of everything I’ve ever known? I can’t understand the worship, I just want to hear English Lord, I told him that multiple times. Quite often on this journey I’ve been in church services where I sat through a whole message with zero knowledge of what was being said and not always a translator, but always grateful when there was one. Sometimes struggling feeling like I wasn’t gaining anything or being fed. How could I, right? Impossible.
Oh, but let me tell you there was a reason for every song I couldn’t understand or message I couldn’t take in because of language barrier. God was and always is in the atmosphere … every tribe, tongue, and nation. I have felt the Lord more in churches around the world than I ever have back home. When my tears started becoming tears of surrender instead of fear, what a shift. I started surrendering to the recognition of my reason for being there, there was something to see and experience and it was and always continues to be him. Month to month, country to country.
Here in Peru last night we were downtown and I found myself in the most beautiful church. We heard the church bells ringing and realized it was marking the beginning of mass. It was the most stunning place of worship. The architecture was exquisite. As my eyes were taking it in, I started getting teary. It wasn’t my place of worship but it was theirs, the many people that filled the pews.
The Bible traditionally refers to the “Upper room” as the site of the last supper. But in short the Upper Room also represents a place of prayer. A secret quiet time and place that you prepare and set aside for the habitation of the Lord. And across the world I’ve seen it look so vastly different and what that looks like for others outside of the American church.
So let‘s break down those walls and realize there are none.
“So help me God
Breathe on my weakness
For all I want is to be like Jesus
I don’t have much
But what I have is Yours to use
So make my whole life Your upper room.”
