Hey again! This blog is actually over a week late, sorry about that haha! Life gets a bit crazy with traveling to a new country and getting adjusted to a completely new way of life there! My team and I have been in Siem Reap, Cambodia for about 10 days now. Life here is so different than Ecuador and it has taken quite a bit of adjusting.
You’ll hear more about all of this in future blogs, but really quick, I will run through a little bit about what ministry looks like here in Cambodia right now! We are living just my team and the guys’ team together at Victory Church. My ministry group (Anna Scott, Drew, Will) and I will be working together for these three months. For the first month here, the four of us were supposed to be teaching an American culture class at a local university. But, since all the schools in the city are closed due to corona virus, we had to make some changes! So until the schools reopen, we are doing a few different things: First, every morning from 6 to 8 we do community service. That’s right, we’re out the door before the sun even comes up haha! We’re counting ourselves lucky though, if you know anything about the brutal Cambodian heat, you’d agree that it’s better to wake up early than to work in the afternoon under the sun! Community service looks like helping clean up the community, like the river or the park or the local open air market! We come back to the church and do some cleaning, then around 10 we start ATL! Basically ATL (“Ask the Lord”) looks like spending some time in worship as a mega team (that’s what we call our two teams when we live together haha) and asking the Lord where He wants us to serve, who He wants us to talk to, etc. Then we go out and do it! So obviously that looks different every day. Sometimes the Lord will give us a specific person to look for. For example, on our first day of ATL the Lord gave both me AND Drew an image of a man wearing blue and white stripes. We ended up meeting a man with a blue and white striped jumpsuit AND blue and white striped sandals, and got to invite him to church. Sometimes ATL could also look like taking your tuk tuk driver out for lunch or writing encouraging notes to people in a coffee shop. We already have some really awesome stories from doing ATL and I’m looking forward to using it as a tool even when I get home, in my own community!
So now, before I go into anything else about Cambodia (stay tuned for more blogs hehe), I have some catching up to do! Before I left Africa and came to Ecuador I posted a blog of a list of lessons I learned in my three months in South Africa. I decided I wanted to do that same thing for my three months in Ecuador!! So without further ado, here are some of the most important lessons I learned in months 4, 5, and 6 of my World Race:
COMMUNITY
For our second and third months in South Africa, our squad was split, and I lived in Johannesburg with only my team and the guys’ team. It was a smaller group and living in community wasn’t as difficult as it was with the group we had grown used to in month one. When we got to Ecuador, all 33 of us squeezed into one house again, and I had to learn about how to live in community all over again. It’s never a fun lesson to learn, but community is one of the biggest parts of the Race and I wanted to be able to embrace it. So I learned more about setting personal boundaries, about meeting needs and even sometimes preferences, and about sharing literally everything I own. I learned about compromise even when it’s difficult, and I learned how to thrive in such a big community even as the world’s biggest introvert (LOL). I learned how to find a healthy balance between getting the alone time I needed, while also making tons of memories with the squad. It wasn’t easy finding that balance, but when I did, community was no longer just a burden, but a blessing.
TO BE FAITHFUL IN THE SMALL (Matthew 25:23)
When we first got our ministries assigned and I found out I would be working with kids with disabilities, I was stoked. But when I actually started ministry I was so frustrated. We had just come from evangelizing in South African squatter camps, and suddenly I was giving foot massages and going on wheelchair walks. I was convinced I wasn’t meant to be there, that I was supposed to be doing something “bigger.” And that mindset only got worse when our ministry started having us do more cleaning behind the scenes. But I learned (the hard way) that every single little thing I do is for the Lord, no matter how small or seemingly “pointless.” What I do for my kids or even for the cooking or cleaning staff, I’m doing for Him. Believe me, it wasn’t an immediate turnaround and I didn’t just suddenly start doing it all with joy. It was HARD and I had to remind myself every single day to be faithful in the little things so that He will trust me with more and give me opportunities. I reminded myself daily: If I can’t be faithful with how He wants me to serve Him here in Ecuador, how could I expect Him to give me more in Cambodia, or even at home? If I can’t serve Him well in the simple and mundane tasks, why do I expect He will just give me something that I (in my eyes) think is better?
YOU NEVER KNOW THE IMPACT YOU COULD HAVE ON A STRANGER
This one comes with a story 🙂 On our last full day of ministry at Camp Hope, my teammate Anna Scott and I walked to the ice cream shop up the hill to buy our favorite chips. We pass the shop every morning on our walk to ministry, and every afternoon on our walk back. We often stop to buy snacks from the sweet old woman who works there, but never really said much besides “buenos dias” or “gracias.” However on this last day, just before Anna walked out with her chips in hand, the woman started crying in Anna’s arms. I ran back inside to ask her what was the matter, and her words absolutely broke me. She told Anna and I that nothing was wrong, but just that we remind her of her daughters. Her daughters live far and don’t visit, and seeing our team walk by every single day and wave hello was serving her in a way we didn’t even know. She told us she just really liked to see us so often because she was missing her own daughters so much. I think what’s so crazy about this is that we never even told the woman when we bought the chips that it was out last day there. I think the Lord really used her to teach me that lesson, that you truly never know the impact you could be having on someone, maybe on a complete stranger. And that’s exactly why it’s so important to look and live like Jesus in all that we do. You never know who’s watching, and you never know who could be touched by your actions, even from afar.
HOW TO LOOK LIKE JESUS, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT HIM
When my team arrived in Ecuador we were all pretty excited about our ministry. However like I said, I remember feeling so frustrated. The two months before had looked like evangelizing every day in the African squatter camps. I had FINALLY worked up the confidence to tell people about Jesus. And then… we got to Ecuador, and my ministry looked like working with kids who couldn’t even understand me when I spoke to them. I had to learn that ministry doesn’t have to just be telling people about Him, but that it also means modeling who Jesus is in all that we do and in the way we treat our kids. This was a lesson to learn for my whole team as well, when it came to the language barrier. If we can’t communicate very well with someone, the most important thing we can do is carry ourselves the way Jesus would.
ANYTHING IS MINISTRY
Ecuador taught me that ministry doesn’t just have to be the assigned place I’m serving from nine to four every day. Sometimes Ministry looks like using my gift of being able to speak Spanish to tell my taxi driver about Jesus. Sometimes Ministry for the day looks like loving and serving my own team back at the base. Sometimes it’s leading worship for my squad after dinner. “Ministry” these past three months wasn’t just Camp Hope on Monday through Friday, it was just life. And that’s a lesson I will NOT leave in Ecuador and that I’m praying I’ll carry back to the states. My life in itself is ministry!
ITS INEVITABLE THAT PEOPLE WILL DISAGREE WITH OR TRY TO DISPROVE MY BELIEFS, BUT HIS OPINION IS THE ONLY ONE TO LISTEN TO.
This one was probably one of the toughest lessons I’ve ever had to to learn. I’ve always been someone who seeks affirmation from the world, and that sucks to admit. Most of the time without even realizing it, I’m expecting someone to tell me I’m doing something right or that they’re proud of me. After I posted my “Losing my Religion, Set Free by Truth” blog, I got more negative feedback than I expected, and it tore me apart. To see so many people I’ve grown up knowing or have looked up to try to tell me that I’m wrong or that I’m making a terrible mistake was heartbreaking. I had to go through my blog comments and delete the negative ones because I didn’t want to look at them. I received lots of not so kind text messages, Instagram DMs, and even Facebook messages from people I hardly know. I got countless messages of people who were nothing but disappointed. I had a LOT of people reach out to try to disprove my decisions, by piecing through things I wrote in my blog and sending long messages trying to prove me wrong. I told myself it wasn’t going to get to my head, but it really, really did. I ended up turning off all social media notifications, because for weeks after posting the blog the messages just didn’t stop coming through. It was so hard to NOT check them, because I knew it wasn’t good for me to just be filling my mind with all the negativity, but I still wanted to see what people had to say. It all broke me down more than I’m willing to admit.
As someone who has always somewhat depended on affirmation from others, I literally didn’t know what to do. Nothing that anyone said would ever change my decision, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t sting to read those things. I had to lean on the Lord and what He says about me, and that was harder than I thought it would be. I learned something about myself: it’s easier for me to trust what the Lord says when the people around me are saying the same thing. It’s like a little extra push/encouragement, you know? But when all of this was happening I had to learn to REALLY depend solely on what HE says about me. I had to learn that the opinions of the world don’t mean anything, not even the positive ones. I learned to trust in the Lord before I trust anyone or anything around me to tell me what’s right/what to do.
I learned that there will always be people who disagree.. And I don’t expect everyone to agree, but respect is something I obviously really appreciate! The messages that touched me the most were the ones from people who don’t agree, but that didn’t try to change my mind and instead respected what I was doing, or even asked questions to learn more, without trying to disprove anything.
(To those people, THANK YOU.)
CONFIDENCE IN MY GIFTS
This is something I’m still learning and always will be working on! When I came to Ecuador, I was one of two people on my squad (33 people!) who spoke Spanish. Right away I was expected to translate everything, from communicating at ministry to giving directions to taxi drivers to ordering food. At first I hated it so much, but over the course of the three months we spent in Ecuador, I learned to count it as a blessing. I had such a gift of being able to share my mission and share JESUS with people we met, which was something not many of my squadmates were able to do. I was also able to love my kids at ministry in a special way by being able to speak their language. But Spanish wasn’t the only thing this lesson applied to: I also learned to be confident when it comes to leading worship! I’ve led worship on guitar for my squad since the very beginning, in fact on one of our first nights in Africa I was asked to lead our first squad worship on the field (SO COOL). I have always loved doing it, but I also get frustrated because being the one playing means it’s a little bit harder for me to enter into worship. I’ve always preferred not doing it. But Ecuador taught me to appreciate the gift that it is to be able to lead my squad in worship. Especially when it came time for our parents to visit, and I ended up leading multiple worship nights. I honestly didn’t want to do it, because I wanted to worship with the rest of the squad, and I’m not a fan of being in the front or feeling under pressure to play. BUT, doing it brings me so much joy, and I’m learning to love using that gift to serve others in that way.
TO PRAY FOR THOSE WHO PERSECUTE ME
Y’all… We all know the Bible tells us to do this, but have you ever tried it? It’s REALLY HARD! Going along with the last point about my blog responses, this is something I learned how to do in Ecuador. When I received a negative comment or message, I would add the name of that person to a (private) list in my journal so I could pray for them and their hearts. I didn’t think it would be as hard as it was. Knowing the things people say, and then STILL responding by wanting to bless that person was a hard mindset to keep myself in. This still isn’t easy for me to do, and maybe it won’t ever be “easy,” but it’s something I know I want to carry with me into the rest of my life.
IF EVERYTHING FELL APART AND EVERYONE TURNED AWAY, HE STILL NEVER WOULD
This is something I had to constantly remind myself of in Ecuador. I know this wasn’t actually the truth of the situation, but with everything that was going on with me finally being open about my decision to leave the Catholic Church, it sometimes felt like the world was against me. It felt like so many people were mad or upset with me and it felt like so many of my relationships were falling apart. Many of them did fall apart, and I’ll just be honest in saying that was/still is a really sucky feeling! I think when all of that was happening it was hard for me to remember that God doesn’t follow that same pattern as the world does… that even if absolutely everything in my life fell apart, He’s the one who is steadfast and unchanging. He’s a God that doesn’t walk out when my life gets messy. I learned when my life changes is big and not so fun ways, to cling to Him and the truth of who He is. I learned to LEAN on that truth.
ITS SELFISH TO KEEP TRUTH TO MYSELF
I think this is the biggest lesson I learned in Ecuador, and one that I will without a doubt carry into the rest of my life.
My team and I have “heart checks” once a week, where we just open the floor to open up about what we are each walking through and talk about it with each other. During one of our heart checks in Ecuador, one of my teammates spoke this over me: it would be selfish of me to keep to myself the truth He has shown me. Ecuador taught me that the gospel is offensive. Let’s be honest, it doesn’t exactly sit right with everyone, especially if someone has only ever known something different. With the religious background I grew up with, I had literally never been told the real good news of the gospel. It always seemed to get twisted or watered down and I never actually learned what His grace could do for me. So I don’t blame people at all for not being open to it. I was there, and I know exactly what those people were probably thinking when they read my blog. Before I decided to hit the “post” button for the blog that I knew would affect a ton of my relationships, I decided to sit with the Lord for one hour and asked Him to speak into the situation: Do I need to make any changes to how I worded things? Did I leave things out because I was scared for how people will react? Do you have anything to tell me about this situation? And after spending that hour in prayer I came to a few conclusions. First of all, I reminded myself that it’s not my job to avoid making people uncomfortable or leave things out to avoid offending anyone. But it IS my job to share truth, and to share my heart, and I won’t let potential opinions or responses hold me back from speaking that truth. And secondly, I felt the Lord tell me a few things. First He gave me a name, and I won’t post that name in here for privacy reasons, but let’s just say I was confused about what that meant. Then He told me that I needed to post the blog just as it was, because someone out there needed to read my words in order to know that it’s okay to start the conversation. So I ended up posting it right then and there, and anxiously awaited the responses. They FLOODED in, and I knew right away that I was right, I couldn’t keep truth to myself. Sure, I got negative feedback, but I also got quite a few messages from people who reached out to tell me that they felt the same way but didn’t know how to take steps out of religion and into a relationship with Jesus. The first message that I received about this was from a member of my old church who I attended youth groups with. I hadn’t talked to that person since before I left the states, but her name was the name the Lord had given me. She needed to know she could talk to me and ask me questions. She told me that she started following Jesus a few weeks prior but didn’t know how to tell the people in her life that she was no longer a Catholic. What a BLESSING it was to be able to talk to her about everything we were both walking through, and to be able to encourage her that the tough conversations aren’t always pretty, but they’re sp worth having. I got so many other messages along the same lines, some from people in my life that I would never have expected to leave Catholicism (but let’s be honest, before the Race I never would have expected that for myself either haha). It was so cool to see how my blog, how MY boldness in stepping out and sharing truth, allowed a space for so many others to speak out. Thanks God 🙂
There are soooo many more lessons that the Lord taught me in Ecuador, but I think this list gives a pretty good glimpse of what these last three months taught me. Even though so many of those lessons were tough to learn, I’m so thankful for everything that I’m carrying with me into Cambodia and into the rest of my life. Some lessons just can’t be learned in a classroom, and I’m SO unbelievably thankful to be here experiencing and learning so much for myself. I can’t wait to see what He teaches me here in Cambodia.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, go take a look at my last blog! It’s a letter to each of my kids from Camp Hope, and it might just be my favorite blog I’ve written so far!
That’s all for now, see you in the next one 🙂
