I’m once again amazed at the Lord’s timing.
This past week, my squad and I have left the city of Battambang, where we spent our first month of the Race doing ministry, to debrief everything that happened to us and the things we’ve learned thus far. We came to stay in Siem Reap, where the famous Angkor Wat resides (photos to come). There’s an AIM base here just outside the main part of the city. It’s a hotel called Overflow. All in all, debrief has been a wonderful time to get to know my squad mates that I didn’t know that well, and to have time to speak to the Lord about everything he’s done to me and through me this past month. But that’s not what I’m writing about right now, that blog will come soon enough. I’m writing about what happened tonight, our last night in the city before returning to daily ministry work.
My friends and I decided to go downtown for our last night and get food, talk to people, and of course walk the world-famous Pub Street. After all of this, a few of us were ready to head on home, and began walking back to where we scheduled to meet our tuk-tuk driver.* On our way back however, my friends and I were stopped by a voice behind us asking, “Hey, are you guys from the World Race?”
Turning around, we found ourselves face-to-face with a young American girl, just about our age or perhaps a year younger. Not really something that surprising in Siem Reap, the largest tourist city in the country.
“Yeah,” we enthusiastically replied, “we’re from the World Race!”
She replied telling me, “I follow the World Race Instagram, and I recognized you from their post!”
Some background for this: some of you know that recently one of my Instagram posts talking about what I learned in Cambodia was reposted by the World Race Instagram. That was pretty neat! My teammate Sam Adams took the photo, so if you’ve got some time, you should go check out his blog that has lots of photos! It’s over on the left side of this page.
Anyways, the girl’s name is Abby. She was with a bunch of her friends, and she told us how she’s the only Christian in her study abroad group, and that she’s been thinking about doing YWAM or the World Race next year. Questions from Abby followed, asking us whether we were all planning on going into mission work or not, and what our favorite parts of our first month were. It was an incredible opportunity to share a snippet of what God’s been teaching us, especially with her friends in the conversation. Afterwards, we got her info so we could follow her on social media and keep up a little bit. My squad mate Eliza told her we’d be praying for her, but we decided to pray for her right there, on Pub Street. What a miraculous experience that was. Hearing the music from the clubs, the chatter from the tourists, the employees trying to sell things to us, all while laying hands on this stranger. We opened our eyes to see tears in hers, and she turned to her friends and said, “See? Jesus is real.”
The Lord’s timing is perfect all the time. The fact that a stranger recognized me on one of the darkest and busiest streets in Cambodia just because of a little Instagram post I made is not a coincidence. Storytelling is no joke. At training camp, we signed a covenant that, among many other important things, stated that we would agree to blogging at least once a week and using social media to tell our story of being on the race. This seemed like a bit of a silly thing to me at the time, to sign a contract saying that I’d do this. But I now see why. The Lord will use anything to get others to step into His plans, including an Instagram post that, at the time, seemed like nothing more than a good picture and a brief caption about God.
So to my fellow Racers, tell your stories. Even if you think others will not listen, or your words don’t matter, or others’ stories are better, God can and will use your story. So share it.
And Abby, if you’re reading this: apply. You will not be disappointed.
*For those that do not know, a tuk-tuk is basically the equivalent of a taxi here in southeast Asia. They’re small, motorized carts (sometimes pulled by moto’s) that can fit anywhere between 5 and 27 people. The capacity kinda just depends on how determined you are.
