This month is a different kind of month for J and K squads. Our race route originally had us in Egypt this month. Long story short, for safety reasons, I am obviously not there.
We were given the opportunity as an August squad to pray into where we felt God was leading our team in Eastern Europe. My team prayed and felt led to Hungary alas, here we are. However, this isn’t a normal ministry month. The World Race has never been to the countries J and K squad currently inhabit. Other teams are in countries like: Albania, Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro. Our goal for this month was to ‘scout.’ Meaning instead of a month of normal ministry we are paving the way for future racers to come back to these countries. This month has primarily been ministering to teammates and working more behind the scenes.
It’s been a weird switch from doing ministry to the logistics side of things, but very cool. We’ve worked on scouting our area, making a detailed description of the city. Including anything from where the nearest ATMs, place to buy food to the spiritual climate and what ministries future teams could work with. We were able to get in contact with an awesome church here this past week.
We went to church there Sunday and happen to come on their Thanksgiving. We were treated like kings and queens and indulged in a HUGE feast, complete with purple soup. Crazy, I know. I had to pep talk my stomach to behave while I indulged in such a feat. However, my stomach was delighted to find this mystery soup was in fact cold, fruit soup and tasted like liquid apple pie. Hungarians certainly know how to do Thanksgiving and it seems this is now a recurring theme in my life,
I mean God must love me to be blessed with 3 months of Thanksgiving right? (Last month we had Moldovan Thanksgiving and next month American Thanksgiving together).
Anywho, I’m now moving on to scout a new city. We’ve been working with another team, Goodness.Gracious, and they’ve split our teams in half. Half will remain in the city we’ve currently been inhabiting Szekesfehervar (say that five times fast) and then the other half, myself included, will travel to a new city called Gyur (pronounced your) where we will work to establish contacts there as well. After another week, we will meet up again and travel to yet another city, Pecs, to seek more ministry opportunities.
All in all, this isn’t how I expected to spend this month. It’s been neat to see what the logistics staff had to do for every country we are visiting this year, makes me really appreciate all their hard work. It’s also cool because most Racers don’t get to do this, and if they do it’s never been in their third month of ministry, usually toward the end of their race so it’s great that AIM has so much trust in us.
Keep your prayers coming for travel, finances, and of course ministry contacts! I’ve had a few more donations come in, a big thanks again to my supporters. This dream wouldn’t be possible without each of your generous hearts. I’m getting closer to being fully funded. I still need about $2,500 to be fully funded for the year. Keep passing the word along.
