The Lord continues to amaze me. I keep praying that He would speak to me and that I would hear His voice more clearly, and I am realizing that He speaks to me more than I realize. Sometimes He just gives me impressions and promptings, and sometimes I hear actual phrases from Him in my head. What I have been learning lately is to recognize His voice when He is speaking and not to shrug it off as my own, and to wait on Him to show me how to fulfill what He is asking of me.
In Kampala, at the very beginning of the month I heard the Lord say, “teach discipleship”. I asked the Lord to give me more direction, but there was no answer. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so I had a few conversations here and there about discipleship, but nothing too significant. I did, however, get a vision for the impact discipleship might have on The Church of the Resurrection if they implemented it. There is a wide range of spiritual maturity in the youth, from 16-year-olds who can’t keep themselves from preaching and talking about God all day long to those who don’t even know how to pray. The problem is that I didn’t know what it would look like practically because apart from the two months of holiday that the youth were on while we were there in January, most of them go to different boarding schools far away. But I continued to pray for discipleship within the church, realizing that might be the main role I was called to play.
Then, the very last week we were in Kampala, my friend Hans took me with him to meet the woman who would be teaching the Bible school he was about to begin. Hans and I had bonded over a desire to go to Bible school, and I was so excited that he was getting ready to start. I thought I would go with him and get a better idea of what one Bible school looks like. Hans’ friend Robert, who had been going to this school for a year already, picked us up and took us to meet his new teacher, Judy. Before she even arrived, we began to talk about discipleship. The conversation topic changed briefly when Judy arrived, but it wasn’t long before she brought it up herself and we discovered that our encounter was supernatural: she had been praying that the Lord would teach her about discipleship, and He had told me to teach it.
Robert, Judy, and I
We sat for hours upon hours for two days sharing experiences and talking about discipleship. Judy also greatly blessed me in many ways. She showed me what it looks like to teach at a Bible school and to be a long-term missionary, she taught me practical things about the Holy Spirit in her life, and she gave me so many resources (sermons and teachings, DVD’s, Bible programs) that will help me to grow in the next year. One of the greatest things I learned in all this is to wait on the Lord when He speaks. Although I still believe the earlier conversations I had about discipleship were profitable, I didn’t realize what He meant when He said “teach discipleship” until the very end. How good it is to wait on Him and to let Him show me exactly what He means!
