I know many of you have already read this blog, but I wanted to add two video's to it that I never had a chance to add. The first one is me explaining what I have learned in a short video that I recorded while I was at the cliffs of More in Ireland. The other is a fun video that my teamate Carmen made of the 3 teams being together in Ireland. It doesn't show a lot of ministry, but it shows the life of the 3 teams and the fun times that we had together!
I hope you are blessed by them and thanks for watching!
Sincerely,
Ryan
What I learned in Ireland: Love Does!
What have I learned from being in Ireland for the first month of the world race? I have begun to truly learn the essence of Love! Love in ministry and in life!
So I am reading this book called, “Love Does” by Bob Goff and the Lord is inspiring and speaking to me through it so so much about the true essence of Love and what true life with Christ is truly all about!
There are a couple of quotes that have inspired me so much that I feel like our quotes that describe my life hope and vision of how I want to live my life WITH Christ.
The first one says, “I don’t validate my faith with a church attendance scorecard. I think of church as a vibrant community of people consisting of two or more of varied backgrounds gathering around Jesus. Sometimes they are at a place that might have a steeple or auditorium seating. But it’s just as likely that church happens elsewhere, like coffee shops or on the edge of a glacier or in the bush of Uganda. All of these places work just fine, I suppose. When it’s a matter of the heart, the place doesn’t matter. For me, it’s – not even a building.” – pg 14 “Love Does.”
This speaks to me so much and reminds me that loving others is what Christ calls us to do and to be. It doesn’t matter how many people we get to come to church, or how many people we talk to in a day. What really matters is that we are loving others with a pure motive in our hearts of wanting to share and be Jesus to and with them. Church is the essence of worshipping Jesus and I love what Bob says about church happening anywhere – like coffee shops, Africa, and anywhere that Jesus is!
Jesus lives in all believers by the power of the Holy Spirit and that means church is not a building and not a place, but rather a person and most of all a people. We as believers are the church and are living vessels of Christ to live in and through. GOD LIVES IN YOU!
Wherever you are today know that Christ lives in you and His love shines through you!
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, GOD LIVES IN US AND HIS LOVE IS MADE COMPELETE IN US.” – 1 John 4:7-12
One evening my teammates and I were walking around the city of Bray, Ireland giving out flyers to people for a church service to a local church we had been working with. On the last flyer I had I met an Uncle and his nephew. The uncle was not too open to learning about God and seemed quite upset with God and Christians. Yet I was blessed with the opportunity to start a conversation with him to get to know him. After 20 minutes of building a relationship with him he actually agreed to come to the church service to hear me give my testimony. He sat within the whole service which honestly was a miracle in itself! I and some of my other teammates then went to McDonalds for the next couple of hours and just sat and talk to our new friends. We talked to them and got to know them. We didn’t try to brain wash them or con them into believing anything. We simply built relationships, shared our stories, and loved them like I believe Jesus would love them.
The Uncle who was very against God, didn’t pray to accept Jesus as His Lord and Savior into his heart or anything. But I believe with all my heart at the end of the night when he went to bed, he was a little more open to God, believing that God is a God of love, and not a God who is angry, mean, and full of judgment.
Before we left the Uncle, he promised my friend and I that he would pray to God tonight saying, “God if you are truly real, show me that you are real in a way that only you can.” He promised that he would pray to Jesus asking him that! I was so amazed at how open the Uncle became to God and that he would actually pray to Jesus asking him to show him if he was real. I remembered that the real work is not in my or our hands, but it’s in Gods. Were just called to be vessels for God’s love and life to flow and live through!
*We are called to love just as Jesus loves!
I believe God showed me what church is that night. It was sitting in McDonald’s getting to love on a person who has been very hurt by the church and who had no idea who the true God of love is. I believe God showed me the essence of ministry that night; how real ministry it is to love others just as Jesus did and still does today!
* Remember that you never know what people are going through or what they went through to make them the people that they are today. Know that the power of God’s love can break through all evil, shine in all darkness and rescue and save ANYONE!
Believe and know that God’s love lives in you and that
God himself lives in you!
Here is a final quote from the book called “Love Does” that has truly inspired me so much. I honestly want this to me my new life vision for how I treat people and how I life my life.
“Being engaged is a way of doing life, a way of living and loving. It’s about going to extremes and expressing the BRIGHT HOPE that life offers us, A HOPE THAT MAKES US BRAVE AND EXPELS DARKNESS WITH LIGHT.
*That’s what I want my life to be all about – full of abandon, whimsy, and IN LOVE I want to be engaged to life and with life.” – pg 24 “Love Does.”
A really good friend of mine in college once said to me, “Ryan, Live Life”
* God spoke to me in that moment through her to inspire me to live my life and to let God unfold and write my story, to not worry about everything but to enjoy the journey, path, and story that I am living.
So now I want to remember what my friend said, and remember to live life, but to live life full of God’s inspiring, amazing, and unfailing TRUE LOVE!
Because its God’s love that makes all things possible and God himself that makes life’s moments worth remembering and inspiring!
God Bless you all and I hope you all are inspired and moved in a way that only God can inspire and move you! Thanks for all of your support and love for me, it honestly means more than you know!
God Bless you all,
Ryan
* Some pictures that relate to this blog below and also a song that speaks to me about God's Love!
