Write some.
Writing encouragement cards. Sounds simple enough, right? That was the ministry given to me and a few other women on my squad. We didn't even have to come up with the right words to say, we just had to copy a pre-written paragraph onto about 100 different cards. These cards were going to be sent to women who had attended the women's ministry in the church that month, in order to personally invite them to come again. The church we are working with this month usually isn't able to do things like that because their church is quite large, and their staff just doesn't have to time. Which is where we come in.
We sat down to do the cards, wrote the cards, and finished the cards all in under an hour. Because we were available to help with whatever the church needed, we asked the head of the women's ministry what things we could do to help the church. She informed us that the biggest thing we could do to help would be to individually pray over each woman's name written on the roster. She then told us that if God brought anything to mind while we were praying for the women individually, to write it down and share it with her.
Pray some.
In order to have a little reference about the rest of my story, we had absolutely no information about any of the names we were praying for. After we had divided up the names, I ended up with four women to pray for. As I was praying for them, God kept bringing things to mind about specific things I needed to pray. An example of one of the women I prayed for was that God would strengthen her marriage, and that she would be able to flee from any temptation she faced. What? That's some pretty specific stuff.
As we came back to the room, I planned on leaving without writing down the things that had come to mind. What if they were things that I had completely made up? What if they weren't really from God? As I was about to leave, I felt God stirring in me to write down the things that had come to mind. So I sat down, wrote down specific things for the four women, then left. And I thought that was it.
Later that day, the head of the women's ministry had tears in her eyes as she came up to some of the people who had been writing cards. She said that everything we had written down was spot on for each of the women. Everything. She then gave an example that someone wrote about God strengthening a woman and her husbands marriage, and to help her flee from temptation. Sound familiar? She then went on to say that for this woman, an affair had just come to light in her and her husbands marriage. Woah.
Learn some.
Something that I've been learning through the race, through this incident, and through day to day life is that God speaks to us personally. I've realized that in the past, I've only allowed Him to speak to me when I was making big decisions, things such as where I was going to college, where I was going to grad school, and even coming on the race. God calls us to be in a relationship with Him, an amazing, fulfilling, freeing, dynamic relationship. How long have I been settling for a relationship full of rules, one-way conversations, and little to no growth? Is that really the kind of relationship that spills over every page of the Bible? Something I challenge for you is this. Start asking God to speak to you in the little things, not just the big events of your life. Give Him the space to start speaking to you personally. You just might find that God has been speaking to you all along, all you needed to do was listen.
