Sorry I haven’t written here on the blog for awhile now, we’ve just recently moved to our new locations for the second half of the trip and my team is getting settled in Port Elizabeth. We also discovered that there are not very many internet cafes where we live, so it’s going to be harder to get access to the internet from here on out. There is a lot that I want to tell you all about our new home, and I’ll see if I can upload some pictures soon, but I just wanted to start of this semester with a really awesome God-story from this week.
One of the first things we did as a team this semester was to do what we call an ATL, or “ask the Lord” outreach on one of the more needy streets of the city. We broke into groups of 3 or 4 and then started praying that God would show us where he wants us to go and what he wants us to do. We were all very nervous from the start, just because we always feel like we never actually hear anything from God, or if we do “feel something” we’re not always sure that it’s God talking. I was pretty much feeling the same way, and not honestly expecting anything really special to happen. I figured that at most we would talk to some random people and perhaps pray for or encourage someone along the way. Thankfully I was with a group that acted really patiently, and honestly waited until we definitely heard something from God.
One of the very first things that came to my mind when we were praying at the beginning was this passage: Proverbs 3:4-5 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.” And for some reason I also just heard the words “trust” and “go” stick out in my mind. And as I was looking down the street I saw this run-down building that used to say Trust something or other, and I took that as a pretty clear sign for a direction to go in. And so after we prayed for a little while and no one else got a really strong calling for anything, we went ahead and trusted God and “went.” So we wandered up and down that street, still really unsure what to do with ourselves. Two of our group members started to feel unwell after we had walked awhile, and they thought we must have gone too far, so we turned back. And after like an hour of wandering I really felt like we should at least try and talk to someone. So we tried a few people, but didn’t really get any connections or anything. Then we finally sat down and prayed some more, and Victoria finally told us that she thought she had seen something, but wasn’t sure enough to tell everyone in the group about it. But she said she had seen a medium-sized red building that we should go to, and she thought she knew where it was too.
So we walked back to where the building was. And to my great surprise, on the side of a medium-sized red building was the word “trust.” And when we went, I didn’t know who to talk to, so I asked the security guard at the door if she if anyone needed prayer. And again to my surprise she took me over to another guy who works there and he started sharing with me a little bit about himself. Apparently he and some of his friends had recently been going through a drug rehab program, and he wanted us to come and speak one of the nights and share with them about God. So we prayed for him, exchanged numbers, and now we’re just waiting for things to happen. And the next thing that happened was another confirmation that God was definitely wanting this to happen. Before-hand a team-mate had seen a street named Downey, and so she was thinking of Robert Downey Jr for some reason, and she thought to herself: if I see a street named Robert St then we are definitely walking down it. And when we get outside the red-building, we realized that we were already on Robert St!!
I know that God sometimes works in crazy ways, and if this isn’t a confirmation of that, I don’t know what is. I guess the point of all this is that I learned how valuable it is to really do things God’s way and not my own. I might be able to pray for some people here and there and make small difference in the world. But really when we start to wait on God’s timing and genuinely listen and wait for Him to call us, that’s when things will really start to move.
God bless, more to come soon, so keep in touch!
