An Adventure Worth Sharing

I am incredibly behind on blogging. My apologies friends and family. But it has definitely not been for lack of things and thoughts to blog on. Very much the exact opposite. It has been a whirlwind since arriving back in Germany from our outreach in Finland. I jumped quickly back into lecture come Monday morning, along with staff meetings, work duties and steps toward future stuff. God has so much good stuff waiting for me and for YWAM Herrnhut! Shoot, He has such wonderful things waiting for the nations!

For this blog post. I actually want to share a very unexpected adventure I found myself in this past weekend. During my DTS I became friends with a wonderful German angel named Evelyn. Seriously, she’s an angel, with the voice to match! I am so thankful to get to hear what God is doing in her heart daily and the music she uses to communicate that. I was pumped to be able to join her along with our other MOTA friends to photograph a fundraising concert she did to raise funds for outreach. It is easy to see where she gets her gentleness and beauty once you meet her parents and experience her home. So I was extra pumped that she invited me to re-visit her home with six other friends for her delayed family birthday visit.

We were all excited for a lovely weekend of amazing homemade German food and rest. Only ten hours of train rides across Germany was standing in our way. Because of recent flooding in East Germany where we live our train was delayed by more than an hour. And if you aren’t used to traveling by train, this meant that our whole schedule was wrecked! We prayed about it and went on in faith. We just felt like God wanted us to continue on this trip for some reason. We were a very lively group, singing, laughing and looking for opportunities to make new friends in every car we sat in. Half way through our trip we had to make a decision of whether we would take the six hour delay that was created by the first train delay or we could hop off early and figure out a different train route. We prayed and asked God what He wanted us to do. We all got some sort of picture or word that seemed like different puzzle pieces. So we kept our eyes peeled and continued to ask God throughout our travel what He was leading us to. We had no idea what we were in for.

Our next stop as the train came to a halt one of the guys with us spotted the round blue sign with a  white arrow pointing to the right just like he saw when we prayed. In excitement we sprinted out the train car and down the road the sign pointed. I confess that I was thinking how ridiculous we were, but as we continued down this vacant road we stopped, looked to the right and saw a teenage guy sitting on the curb of a cobble stone parking lot drinking and smoking. As I said before we are always up for making new friends. So all eight of us wondered over to this guy and struck up a conversation. He was excited to meet Americans ;) A few minutes later his other friend joined him. It didn’t take us long to realize a couple more of the puzzle pieces we had received while praying were right in front of us. While praying one of us also received that we should worship by the fountain on the cobble stone. Check on the cobble stone. And right across the street stood this large hotel that in German read “come to the good fountain”. I mean we were thinking an actual fountain, but our God has a sense of humor and always meets us in unexpected ways. Coincidence? You can say that, or you can believe that our God is a personal God that speaks to us and leads us to amazing opportunities to be used by Him to reach the lost. So we continued to hang out with these two guys. The guitars came out and they played a few songs they enjoyed for us and we did the same. Our songs just happened to involve the name of Jesus =)  We shared how Jesus changed our lives and how he wanted to do the same for them. The next puzzle piece and confirmation to us that we were in the midst of a divine appointment was realized when one of the guys text tone went off. It chirped like a bird. One of us had a picture of a bird when we prayed. We were getting along great with our new friends and asked them if they would allow us to pray with them/for them. Even though neither really believed in God they agreed. We began to pray for our new friends, asking God to reveal himself in a personal way to them both. Not far into our prayers the first guy we met urged us to stop. “stop, stop, stop” he said. “I have this picture in my head. I see this picture in my head.” We asked him to describe what it was. He said that he was sitting by a fountain. That it was perfect and so peaceful. That he had this feeling, like something bubbling in his stomach. We were all so in awe! We told him “That’s God! That’s God.” Then our friend went on to repent. Asking God to forgive him for saying bad things about Him and not respecting Him. We all continued to talk and answer questions they had for us about this God. At the end of the night our friend that had the vision wanted a relationship with God and asked Him into his heart and the other continued to ask more and more questions.

This was the most beautiful thing that I have ever been a part of.  Besides us having a little faith that our Father speaks to us and us chasing after what we felt was being spoken, it didn’t have too much to do with us, Everything else was Him orchestrating details for a meeting with these two guys and inviting us to be a part of Him encountering them. What a beautiful thing to be a part of His kingdom and given the invitation to invite others into our family. Like I mentioned earlier, I was skeptical at first of running in the direction of a sign that we had no idea where it led to, yet God still used me. We don’t have everything figured out and we aren’t perfect, yet God is still able to use us. How good is our God! We weren’t “officially” on outreach, but that didn’t mean that God wasn’t more than ready to use us to reach out to those who don’t know Him. Unexpectedly in this small German city God showed me just a little clearer how passionate and relentless He is when it comes to His children knowing His love for us. 

These are our two new friends we met.

If you look really closely you can see the hotel to the left that reads "...come to the good fountain" in German.