* Be sure to read Part 1 of this post “Ministry or Mission Field“ before continuing below *
Month 6 – Tirana, Albania
Team Oneders
This month our host was a pastor and his family in the capital. Their services and ministries were held in an apartment renovated into their church. We stayed there and shared in services each week. We also ran a children’s ministry and VBS in the community every weekend. During the week we joined the pastor’s ministry in which he visited different prisons across the city. We sat with the prisoners and facilitated his bible study through the book of Mark. After which we played games like Uno and cards with those men.
It was incredible to see them, living where they did because of a mistake, men exactly like me.
It made me realize the way Jesus pleads for us in all of our “crimes” before the courts of heaven, and how in him we will never receive the punishment we deserve.
Every Tuesday we participated in a transitional program for girls who had escaped sex-trafficking.
These girls opened our eyes to the evils of the world and the damage so many women have to try and overcome.
We shared our testimonies, talked with the girls, joined in their bible study and prayed for them. We also got to join them on an outing to the park at the end of the month where we played games, painted their nails, and enjoyed some normal fun. One evening a week we taught English lessons at the church. We hosted a women’s retreat one night for the women of the church where we gave them a little pampering and enjoyed prayer and fellowship. Over the course of the month we also painted a mural for a local kindergarten in the community.
See my teammate Julia Bird’s blog-post :
http://juliabird.theworldrace.org/post/we-dont-have-to-live-in-shackles
And our team’s video from the month to get a picture :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE-uAezU1sI&t=27s
Month 7 – Kathmandu, Nepal
Team Oneders
Kathmandu was merely our home-base for this month of ministry. We really traveled the entire month, visiting 20 churches in 25 days all over the country. Our host was a Pastor who had a hand in planting all of these and he wanted us to share at each of them, to speak into the lives of the people there. We stayed in the homes of different church families everywhere. The month is almost indescribable. We shared our testimonies in one-room apartments converted into churches. We walked street after rock laden street to parishioner’s homes. Rode bus after bus dodging cow after car to the center of cities. We worshiped on single bulb lit rooftops. Traveled to the scorching Indian border into tiny village churches surrounded by water buffalo and back again. Went up into the mist enclosed mountains of Gorka where we hiked to a house in the cleft of the hills. Played music in house-church. Took Jeeps into the jungle because no other vehicle could pass. Where we heard jaw-dropping testimonies of the many ways that God is still in the business of miracles.
We watched women fight for deliverance and joined them in the fight. Prayed for hours for healing.
Waited with journals as fans while workers made their way in from the rice fields and harvest, to the impromptu service, just to hear what we had to say. Held stranger’s babies in overcrowded vans turned buses. And journeying to yet another church, crammed 26 people into a 12 passenger van at one time. At one point in our month we visited an orphanage ran by our Pastor’s friend. Several of the children there had been left orphaned after the ravaging earthquake just the year prior. This month was one of the most memorable for everyone on our Squad and…
I still struggle to put all the magic into words.
See my previous blog : “From the Nepali Observatory”
http://maryheflin.theworldrace.org/post/from-the-nepali-observatory
And be sure to watch our team’s video of this month to get a better picture :
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6C1fFPf0bVY&feature=share
Month 8 – Hyderabad, India
Team Oneders
We spent India with an amazing organization called “Sarah’s Covenant Homes”
( http://www.schindia.com/ ). SCH is a network of orphanages for children with special needs. People with special needs of any kind are very outcast from society in India. The vision of SCH is to provide a loving, Christ centered family-style home for each child. A place where not just their physical needs (which can be a whole lot) can be met but a place where they can blossom and grow.
A home in which they are safe and loved, where they are free to become who they were created to be.
So this month we helped in all the different SCH homes however we could. They had begun the process of moving one home into another, better one in the neighborhood, so we helped move and paint. We played with the kids and helped their House Moms and caregivers. Our hearts were stolen by each precious little one right away, though some made particularly deep impressions. One of the girls shone bright with spunk and personality. Adorable, spirited, and clearly sharp, I asked why she wasn’t in school like some of the others and her House Mom told me,
“here she is too… different. The school won’t accept her”.
Statements like these broke my heart and opened my eyes to the lives of children and people with special needs in our greater world.
Some of us had parents who came out and met us on the field on a “Parent Vision Trip” with AIM. They got a glimpse into what ministry can be like on the Race by joining us at SCH.
See some of our time with them at SCH here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SriCJM5lBsA
There are some tiny hands that hold my heart forever in Hyderabad.
Month 9 – Melaka, Malaysia
Team Oneders
Malaysia meant something completely different in ministry for each of the teams on our Squad. For our team is meant working with Straits Baptist Church in Melaka. We helped run a weekend program which taught English to kids in the community, taught English to Chinese-native stay-at-home Moms, and set up for the church’s summer VBS. Then we took the kids on a day-trip to get them excited for it. We participated in youth group and led afternoon programs for high schoolers where we led worship, spoke, shared our testimonies, and played games. We did the same in Strait’s “Tamil” service for the local Indian community. The church held a lunch event for its college students at which we spoke and shared of our college experiences and that of being a missionary. We later had a small group in the home in which we stayed and played games with some of them. One evening each week we split up and joined the church’s different adult small groups as they met in member’s homes.
This was wonderful for us to be able to join a bible study in our native tongue and be filled up with the word. Not only were we poured into but we were able to share about our experience on the Race thus far and all the Lord had done in the past 9 months.
It is a tremendous blessing to remind yourself of what the Lord has done. And in sharing your story you retell it to your heart every time.
Month 10 – Mae Hong Son, Thailand
Team Braided Bunch
We made our way in by pickup truck to the “Long-Neck Karen” village surrounded by jungle on the outskirts of Mae Hong Son. This village of bamboo huts sat on the edge of a Burmese refugee camp and housed a school for area children with students and teachers from the camp itself. * Our hosts founded “Freedom Harvest Ministries” (www.freedomharvest.org ) with a home in the village for orphaned refugee children and those who needed a place to live outside the camp. “Grace House” also afforded parents who had to live and work in cities far from Mae Hong a place for their kids to be lovingly cared for while they attend school away from their parents. Grace House served not only as the community’s church but was a gathering place for the whole village.
We lived life with them every day.
This month we helped the teachers who were trying to learn English themselves in this village school, teach it. And sometimes jumped in to help teach other subjects as well.
If these kids could learn English, they can potentially get better jobs (or a job) and be able to go out from this tiny village or leave the refugee camp where some of their families had been living for 25 years.
Each day we taught in several classes. We played sports after school. We took some time to tutor each child in our classes for a little while, rotating through 2 students every night. We had fellowship with all the Grace House kids every evening. For the 2-3 hours of electricity we had we worshiped, played games, and someone from our team spoke while our host translated. Either something that God had impressed upon their heart to share with them or a bible lesson. One of the kids would share their testimony, moving us to tears every time and one of us would share ours.
The people in this place had been through a lot, have a little, and possess some of the greatest Joy I have ever seen.
Month 11 – Siem Reap, Cambodia
Team Braided Bunch
In the capital city of Siem Reap we stayed with our hosts, a missionary family from the Philippines. They felt God put the call on their hearts to come to Cambodia and open a school for children of missionary families and expats, “Eli International School”. They have now opened it to the community and some children from the surrounding villages have sponsorships to attend. This school uses the P.A.C.E. model of learning, a Christian American curriculum designed for self-teaching, one that children are able to also take home. That way if their family moves out onto a more rural mission field for a time, they don’t miss school. When our team arrived the school was preparing to compete in a National Student Convention with categories such as, the visual arts, scripture memorization & bible reference, one-act play, music, public speaking, and spelling. Not only did we assist the teachers in their classrooms every day but each of us spent time with the different students participating in the convention to prepare them for their roles.
In a school with teachers already spread thin (what school’s aren’t?) our team’s gifts lent well in those aspects.
One day a week 2 team members would go with one of our hosts to a drug rehabilitation center in the city.
Our hosts have answered every call they feel the Lord has placed on their hearts
…and the drug rehab is one of them. We shared our testimonies, a devotional, worshiped, and prayed with the people there. Another day 2 more would assist in a program called “W.O.W – Women of Worth” designed for women from villages which taught them how to make specialty crafts and items to sell in order to support their families. When one of the girls from our team bought something the woman who made it said,
“Oh thank you, this is great! This money will feed my family today”.
One evening each week we went out to one of the villages to spend time with the kids there. We had art and English lessons for them and played games. Tuesdays we joined the small group held by the teenagers from Eli School and enjoyed time in fellowship with them. Our hosts planted several churches in the villages outside the city. So on the weekends we went with the family, who always split up to host Sunday services at each church. We preached, held Sunday school, and children’s activities. Taught new songs, games and bible lessons. I saw how much our hosts used everything at their disposal to find new ways to serve the Lord in the community in which they lived.
I have been more than blessed to serve with every one of these incredible ministries all over the world. Not only so, but to meet and come alongside the people serving God in each of these nations, cities, and small communities. To get a glimpse of what every day ministry can look like overseas in ever changing environments and new cultures.
To begin thinking in a new way, what is my mission field? Where is my mission field? What does ministry look like in it?
To communicate love through play.
To see what it means to give your life to the Lord and follow His call to bring kingdom here.
