Ebenezer (Updated)

As my time in Thailand draws to a close, all too soon, so does my time with Abiding Azar.

This month, we have had the most beautiful opportunity to serve all over Thailand! We worked in a rehab center in one city and a Buddhist school in another! We did manual labor at an orphanage as well as played with some cute kiddos. We danced and sang and put on performance after performance. It was a month of pouring and giving and loving til we drop!

I couldn’t have asked to end my time with Abiding Azar in a sweeter way than celebrating Jesus with Christmas celebrations (like three times!)!!

As I have taken time to remember these last five months alongside of these women, I find myself full of gratitude and joy. No one could have told me in June that I would love them like I do, that I would have found the friendships that I have in them!

(Training camp, June 2017)

 

What an honor it was to do life with them, to serve with them. What an honor it has been to grow alongside of them. What a honor it has been to be pushed onward and upward, to look more like Jesus, by them. I look back on the Melissa I was August 8th and the woman who stands before me in the mirror today and I see two different people. A lot of growth has happened in those five months. A lot of stretching through the uncomfortable, a lot of wisdom being poured, a lot of heart checks and humility.

At our kitchen table in Albania, as a team, we said we would “fiercely pursue righteousness with humility, intentionality and love”. I see it in every one of them. I see it in how we have grown to speak to one another, about one another. I see it in how we work, how we serve, how we love. These woman have shown me what it looks like to follow Jesus and be a follower of Jesus.

In the Old Testament of the Bible, to remember all that God had done for the Israelites, they placed a rock in a certain place to remember God’s faithfulness, they called it Ebenezer.

At the end of Month Five, as the final curtain of Abiding Azar draws to a close, I have found my Ebenezer.

 

 

(December 26, 2017)

 

For all that He is done already.
For all that is to come.

 

Faithful He has been.
Faithful He will be.

 

Abiding Azar, I love you forever.