THAILAND! The country I was the MOST excited to visit finally arrived! I had my heart set on working with She Ministries from before the race began. I just knew that being an all girls team was a guarantee I would get it. Welp, the email finally came telling me where my team would be placed and guess what…it was NOT what I expected. To my disappointment, the email said my team would be doing Unsung Heroes. My heart sank. I almost burst into tears. The one thing I wanted didn’t happen. Now I was at a cross roads – either keep a bad attitude and make the month terrible, or change my perspective and believe God could have something better for me than I could see. Although it wasn’t what I felt like doing, I chose the latter. I am such a dreamer and when I get my heart set on something specific, it’s hard for me to let that go. Even though He’s the King of the universe, I sometimes have a hard time believing He knows what’s best for me. But I tried my hardest to let Him blow my expectations this month.
Being Unsung is really hard. You try and connect with potential contacts, send emails, pray and wait. Now, that last word is NOT one I like to have in my life. So God for sure taught me a lot about waiting on His Spirit to lead. One day in prayer, He spoke to me about the ONE. In the Bible, Jesus used a lot of different illustrations for how important just ONE is to the Father – coin, prodigal son, sheep, etc. One of my favorites is found in Luke 15 about the lost sheep.
“If he has lost ONE of them, does he not leave the ninety-nine and
go after the ONE that is lost until he finds it?”
Jesus cares so much about ONE. Just one life, one soul surrendered to Him brings Him the greatest pleasure. For me, a lot of times, I am looking for the multitudes and masses. There are so many lost ones, and I want to bring them all to the saving knowledge of Christ. But often, I miss the one. This is something God has been teaching me this month. Look for the one. So, I started praying and asking Him to lead me to the one He had planned for me this month. Day after day passed and nothing happened. I was trying not to get discouraged.
A week or so passed and our team was headed down to Phuket to meet a contact there. I started doing some searching for more contacts that we could potentially meet while we were there. So I hopped on google. Sometimes that’s the best place to start. I started searching for contacts in the surrounding area, and I found this place pop up that looked like a Christian retreat center. I clicked on it and sent them an email about us. To my surprise, they emailed back right away! Most of the time doing Unsung, people don’t respond or could take days to get back with you so this was really refreshing! We set up a time to come and check out their ministry.
Alex and I got onto a bus and headed about an hour outside of Phuket where they picked us up. I had no idea what to expect. These two ladies picked us up and took us back to their location. And it was wonderful! This place is incredible! The grounds are beautiful, the property was super nice and the staff was more than friendly. We got a tour around the place and then they treated us to a coffee and treat in their coffee shop. We sat there talking for about an hour about their lives, ministry and a little about ours. They do church planting, evangelism, prison ministry, orphan ministry, run a coffee shop, dance classes, teaching English, kids sports camp, Muslim village ministry and SO much more. It was truly incredible to see how God is using them to really make a difference in Thailand.
This is the cool part. As we were sharing, they told us that they have been praying for months that God would send them connections. That God would make a way for them to network with churches and organizations to bring teams and further the Kingdom work in Thailand. When they shared this with me, I got chills all over my body! I could feel the Holy Spirit in that coffee shop. THIS was it. THIS was the ONE place where I knew God wanted me to find. These women are incredible. They have hearts so rare and so vast for His purposes. They don’t have an easy road but they take it on with joy! The town they were in is the most un-evangelized in all of Thailand. So they have a huge harvest field ahead of them, but they need more laborers. They will make amazing contacts for the World Race, but even further than that. They would be somewhere I would want to come back to after the race is over. I would love to work with this ministry! This is the first place I have found in the last six months where I really felt God calling me to come back.
Who knew that google could do all that? Although, I know that google had nothing to do with it. It was just the tool God used to connect me with these people. They were such an encouragement to me and I hope that I was able to encourage them. We spent the rest of the afternoon sharing stories and cashing sand crabs. Hearing about how God saved them from Buddhism and brought them into His marvelous light. Testimonies of how through Jesus, their family members are walking with Him today. It was such a shot in the arm for me. It was JUST what I needed and had been looking for this month. It was the ONE.
Maybe today you aren’t in another country searching for people doing His work. Maybe today your ONE that God could want you to reach is the cashier at Wal-Mart. Lord knows that is a scary place this time of year. There are 870 people trying to check out and only 3 lanes open. Or maybe your ONE is the person behind you who is struggling financially and God wants you to buy their groceries. What about your family? Could God want you to pursue ONE of the loved ones you have been avoiding? Co-workers, spouses, siblings, strangers, friends, etc…the list goes on and on. No matter where we live or what we do, as believers we are all called to give light to those who sit in darkness.
But maybe today the ONE is YOU! Maybe God want you to know that YOU are His one. That He would come after you if you were lost. Like the shepherd who went looking for his one lost sheep, Jesus is looking for you today. He wants to restore you, refresh you, encourage you, ravish you with His love, build you back up, fill you with peace, cause your heart to bubble over with joy, empower you to succeed and give you the strength you need to carry on. We serve a God who lifts us from the ashes of failure and disappointment and remakes our lives into something beautiful. He chose you as His ONE love. He went to that cross for you…only YOU. You may feel like one in a million, but you are ONE valuable person to the King.
“God’s love is meteoric – very rapid; His loyalty astronomic – extremely large; His purpose titanic – exceptional strength, size and power; His verdicts oceanic – enormous, vast and huge; yet in His largeness NOTHING gets lost, not a man, nor a mouse, slips through the cracks. How exquisite is His love. How eager You are to pursue us.You’re a fountain of cascading light and You open our eyes to Your LIGHT.”
