This month in Malaysia has looked differently than our previous months on the race. Instead of hosts and ministry contacts being lined up for us, we’ve had to secure these for ourselves. We’ve all had to meet with our teams and seek the Lord’s guidance on where to live and what to do with our time here. AIM has given this approach the title of “Ask the Lord.”
My team and I spent individual time in prayer about where to stay this month, and were led to a backpackers hostel, Grocers Inn, that’s attached to the back of a café/restaurant called The Toast (which just so happens to serve delicious food). My team and I have spent time prior to this month seeking God’s guidance on places to go and people to talk to, and this has led to some incredible interactions with locals everywhere. However, we decided to take a slightly different approach to ministry this month.
Leadership has repeatedly told us that “Ministry is life, life is ministry,” meaning that ministry is a lifestyle and should be incorporated into your “normal” daily living. Ministry doesn’t end as soon as our “scheduled” time for ministry is over, because it should be lived out constantly. The World Race isn’t just about bringing kingdom to 11 different countries; it’s about learning how to live a spirit led life, learning skills to take home with you in order to integrate daily guidance by the Holy Spirit into your every day living. It’s about being interruptible, willing to stop what you’re doing and follow the Spirit when you feel it move. This is exactly what my team and I decided to do with our time in Kuala Lumpur.
Every day when we wake up, we’re faced with the decision of how to spend our day. We each decided that we were going to spend this month living a normal life. The only unique thing about it is that we would be doing this in Malaysia. We’ve walked around the Chinese marketplace, gone to different restaurants, visited the mall, and have spent a lot of time in coffee shops. Instead of asking God for miracles and to be led to people who are living in extreme circumstances, we’ve been asking him to lead us to people in a more natural way, people who just need to experience a taste of his love through an interaction.
Everyone on our team has gone out individually, in pairs, or in larger groups, so we’ve each had different conversations and have built relationships with different people. I can say with confidence that God has been working through each of these interactions to reach the people in Malaysia. Sometimes in our conversations, God is not even mentioned once, and that’s ok because it is still possible to share Christ with people through how we love and talk to them.
I’ve had some great conversations with random strangers I’ve sat next to at a coffee shop. I’ve built friendly and fun relationships with the baristas I see every day. I’ve talked about Jesus with the employees at the hostel we are staying at, and love joking around with them every time I walk up and down the never-ending staircase (multiple times a day) to our bunk beds. Some people have asked us about Christianity, and some people have not, but that doesn’t diminish the time my team and I have spent investing in these relationships.
We are learning more each day about what it looks like to have Christ not only buried within our hearts, but also floating on the surface of our days. We’ve taken the past week to try and live as normal a life as possible (given the circumstances) to see how we can apply this approach to living. Ministry is not an action, it is a state of being. As a Christian, it is an existence that should be a reality. You don’t need to travel across the world to be a missionary. There are hurting and broken people everywhere we look, and sometimes a simple smile to a stranger can reveal to them the face of God.
