Hello again!
So I am a little behind with my once a week blog. I think it is only because I look at how far I’ve already come on this journey he has me on and have no idea where to start. There’s just SO much to fill people in on. So get ready because we are about to go back to like 2008!
In 2008 the BCM in Lafayette took a trip to Lesotho South Africa! I wanted to go SO bad! I had never been on a mission trip before and at the time I was 24. I knew that it would be SO amazing and nothing like I had ever experienced! Unfortunately the timing wasn’t right! I was packing up that summer and moving to Katy Texas to start college and live with my dad. This was tough because I am EXTREMELY independent and had been on my own since I graduated high school and was 18! I may not have financially made the best choices, but I was on my own. Needless to say I am a home body and LOVE Louisiana and my whole life was home so I only stayed In Katy for 3 semester! When I moved back home the BCM was taking another trip to South Africa and I didn’t care what I had to do .. I WAS GOING! I raised a lot of the money but still needed $1,300 dollars. I sent out messages on fb to people on my church staff and snail mailed letters to everyone I could think of! The night before the money was due, my pastor made an anouncement saying that he had received a message from me and would be donating to me and anyone else who felt called to give should do the same. That night I walked away with $1,400 dollars!!!! Like SERIOUSLY!! haha. So that is when I learned that money is NO obstacle! If God want’s you there he WILL provide!
SO Africa! How do I even try to fit Africa in a paragraph? It is HUGE in both size and need but is also huge in heart, pride and love. I went very naive! Never having gone anywhere out of the country except Mexico. The first day out I was so shocked at the number of children who showed up and were so eager to see what we had to say! I thought that this would be way too easy! Ha! It was easy to talk to them about Jesus love. To read them stories about the crippled man being lowered from the ceiling and watching their faces as the translator spoke to them! I was blown away at the amount of children that came to this HUGE open field in the middle of the neighborhood and all we had to do was drive up.
I wasn’t ready, nor do I think anything could have really prepared me for the conditions of the children. Here we are with 3 and four layers on (bc it was winter in Africa) and these kids were in t-shirts, shorts, shoeless, or shoes with holes. They had snot dried to their faces and matted hair but still had HUGE smiles on their faces! My heart was crushed! I held it together that first day. I played with all the kids and loved on them as much as I possibly could. We were doing a lot of soccer drills and different exercises with them (but really they were better than us) so it was easy to find a distraction. At the end of the day there were hundreds of hugs and see you tomorrows and the emotions started to rise. After sitting down in the bus I lost it! Cried for a good 30 minutes. The whole crew was stopping at the local store to purchase items we may want while on the trip and I couldn’t go. I couldn’t focus on anything besides what I had just experienced. I got off the bus and just remember sobbing like a baby. Why is this ok? Why do I get to live the way I do just because I was born in a certain part of the world? Why do these children have to freeze when we have so many layers? Why do these parents have to leave their children, that may be as young as 5 or 6, in charge of watching the babies just so they can put one meal on the table a day?! Why do they have to live in these shacks with dirt floors and tin roofs when we live in houses that have bathrooms bigger than their entire home? Why we, on our worst day, are better than any good day they will ever have? And yet here they are, with open arms, huge hearts and bright smiles. Smiles that to this day I still think of everyday of my life. You don’t leave a site like that and NOT be changed! The things that I experienced on that trip changed my expectations I had for my life. That mission trip rewired my heart. That trip set in motion the future God was showing me he had for me, because up until that point I thought about how cool it would be to go on a mission trip or how exciting it would be to travel. Now, all I think about every other second of every day from that point on was, where can I go next? God where do you need me? What are you calling me to do next? I wanted to go back to Africa.. I still do want to go back, but I had this thing that kept saying.. God doesn’t only need you in Africa, so I decided to branch out.
The following summer, in 2011, I went with the same BCM to Naples Italy. It was beautiful! This trip was 100% different from Johannesburg South Africa! It was built up, extremely populated, very busy and you didn’t see the poverty and despair. You did however see empty and lost people. Naples has almost a million people living their, and of those everyone claims Catholicism. Which is fine, I have no beef about other people or religious titles but the thing that I couldn’t get past is that they said only about 30% actually live the life they claim to believe. I could see that while looking at this city it wasn’t as vivid of a mission, but after hearing that information I could totally understand why God needed us there. We again loved on kids, painted faces, handed out salvation bracelet packets and explained them, played sports with some of the older youth and prayer walked. We had hundreds of opportunities to talk about God and help them to understand and believe in something and not just claim something that they had no idea about. Even when we went to Rome to see the city we had so many opportunities to talk to people about their understanding of who God is and what he has done for us. It was an amazing experience but I knew that I wanted more. I had a heart that was changed from my serving in Africa and knew that I had to experience something like that again!
In January on 2013 I went to Haiti with my church. It was a lot more like Africa than I would have expected for only being a 2hr flight from the United States! You expect to see stuff like that on the other side of the world, but not that close! It opened my eyes again. I didn’t even get from the airport to the place we were staying before crying this time! We stopped in traffic and the driver of our vehicle held out a container with left overs. Thats when I saw two children standing in the middle of the road, with traffic zooming like crazy on every side. They ran out and grabbed the food and ran to the other side of the road, where they opened the box very fast and ate the contents as soon as they could. So many thoughts ran through my head! Why are they allowed to stand int he middle of this crazy busy road? Why did they take food from a stranger? Weren’t they worried that the guy may have done something to it? When was the last time they ate? Where are their parents? Again I found myself sobbing. God had opened my eyes to see needs that were so huge again. While serving in Haiti I honestly feel they may have taught me more than I taught them. To hear their worship and see their faces and how much they loved and trusted God.. even though they had nothing! We have everything we could EVER need and MORE and we still get upset with God sometimes! It was such a beautiful thing to see that while having nothing they had complete and total faith and trust in the fact that he would provide. Even with thousands of them still living in refugee camps from the earthquake years ago, they still had this love and this certainty. Not everyone was this way of course but thats why we were there, to try to encourage and spread his love light and truth! We Helped with medical clinics that we set up in local churches while other team members did like a VBS with the children.
I got back from that trip and knew that I wanted to go somewhere longer than just a week or a week and a half. I wanted to not just plant the seed but maybe see someone else’s fruit grow. I wanted to form larger bonds and connections with people God put in my path. I started to look for longer trips. Then in one week I heard from 5 or 6 different people about this thing called the world race. I watched videos of course, but it didn’t seem like I could actually do something like that! I kept finding myself looking up videos and blogs though. So I told God “Okay if you want me to do this, you need to make it clear. If this is not from you please take it from me.” It only got stronger and more real. I helped with a summer camp last summer and the entire week God was YELLING at me! When I got home I talked to some friends from Katy and they offered for me to live with them to save until I needed to leave. I put my notice in for the end of October and changed my year lease on my apartment to a 6 month lease. In January I fully moved to Texas and got a job to start saving. But I still hadn’t put in an application. So I finally couldn’t wait any longer and had my interview on April 1st! I got accepted and my life has been crazy and exciting every single second since then! I cannot wait to see the amazing and awesome plans God has in store for me while I’m on this trip!! I have a lot to do and a good bit of fundraising and letters to get to, but I have no doubt that if God wants me there, he will provide all means necessary!
Thanks for reading 🙂
Until next time.. God Bless!
Isaiah 6:8
