Blessed to be a Blessing

So as some may know my next step is to continue on as a full time missionary with YWAM Herrnhut. . . Details to be sorted out ;) A big part of choosing to be a full time missionary is living a lifestyle that is completely dependent on God providing finances through supporters and other crazy miracles here and there. Some people see this as a huge daunting task and not something to look forward to. While it can be seen as crazy and an awful thing I personally get really excited about it! YWAM believes in every missionary raising their own personal support instead of corporately raising support and then getting a check every month from the top down like the majority of missions organizations do today. I am totally for the personal fund raising because it gives God so much room to show up and allows me to invite my family, friends and even strangers to be a part of what God is doing in me and through me. I get to invite people to be a part of amazing stories of God’s provision! God created us for relationship! Vertical and Horizontal! Relationship with Him (Vertical) and relationship with those around us (horizontal). Get it? It looks like a cross ;) Alright, moving on from cheesy illustrations.

I always wondered why the heck I was blessed with so many awesome people that loved me through out my life. And I am convinced that it is this very reason. To invite everyone to be a part of bringing God’s kingdom to this earth! Whether it is through people supporting me with encouragement, prayer or finances! We get to be a team working for His glory! I love it! I always wish that everyone could experience all the places and stories I am blessed with and this is a way that not only can I invite others to play a part, but to own it! It gets me excited to give others the opportunity to say “hey, I helped bring joy or freedom to that girl in the Thailand red light district and that little boy in the slums!” because really, in my eyes everyone who offered a helping hand or two cents to me getting to Discipleship Training School in Germany in the first place has the right to say that!

Our Father loves people! And He loves partnering with people! If I have learned one thing in my school it is that our God is aching to give things to us according to His will! All blessings and revelations are in His hands , but He chooses to use US to take action to release it on this earth! Be it finances, prayer, joy, freedom etc. Through people taking action my Father released His provision in crazy ways for me to go to Germany, Spain, Thailand, Finland and to buy a vanilla chai latte when I was having a rough day! haha Agh, so beautiful! And it is my Father’s character to be faithful! Which He has very much done these last few months that I have been in the School Of Intercessory Prayer, both in big and small ways!

(Check THIS out if you care to have an idea of how excited I get when it comes to chai lattes!)

Moving on. . . 

I am giddy to share a couple of examples with ya!

The first situation: After DTS I decided to come home and raise funds to return back to Germany to be a part of the School Of Intercessory Prayer. This meant I was looking at raising $3000 in 6 weeks or so for the flight, lecture fees and other costs. RIDICULOUS right?! Well obviously I am sitting in Germany as a student of SOIP writing this =) GO GOD! Through working and donations I was able to pay for my flight and part of my school fees. In this time a good friend of mine, Betsy, who is a photographer and who also inspired me to do YWAM in the first place said she would like to donate to me by offering a limited amount of photo sessions to contribute to my school fees! People! Photographing and editing is way more work than most people understand. This was an insane offer! I was blown away. This is her career. How she pays for food, gas, rent etc. Who am I to be sacrificed for like that, ya know?

I had an expected number in my head of what my friend would donate and I expected to come up $200 or so short of completely paying off all my fees, but when I looked into my account I found that through Betsy God provided the difference of fees and then some! It was such a beautiful thing to be a part of! Please check out one of the Betsy's work HERE. Your eyes will be very happy!

The second situation is a testimony of a friend I was blessed by. Not only does God come through with the big things, but He also takes joy in providing the small things.

Background info: I love running, but I made the mistake of forgetting my worn running shoes in Germany while on my three week outreach in Finland so I chose to use a pair of shoes my Spanish friend blessed me with to take a run in, although they are far from running shoes. haha Then being the social media lover that I am I shared my adventure wearing my "Spanish shoes" on Instagram. READ ON! 

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I love to travel, so I have been glued to Allie's Instagram and blog since she left for YWAM in Herrnhut, Germany. Her pictures are incredible and make me want to spend time at every place she photographs. This is an important point to this story so keep my addiction to her social media in mind, but I guess the beginning of this story for me started in a work in my heart that God was uprooting. 

I have never thought of myself as a selfish person and have tired to put others before myself whenever I can. It is my approach to this behavior that had to be dealt with. I was living by the golden rule. "Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you." I was placing value on the fact of how my actions would provoke a response in their words or their actions towards me. First, God showed me, with new eyes, the verse: Colossians 3:23
 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters. 
I had always thought of this verse as the things you do to achieve things or for gain. I like many of us do, in many cases, was bending the scripture to fit my needs. Saying "Yes Lord I will work hard on this (test, project, house chore) so that you will bless the result!" But I had ignored the facet of working hard in His name to make much of Him through blessing others purely for them to know Him. 

Second, during the same day as this epiphany, I watched a video from about a boy who had just passed away at the age of 17 from terminal cancer. It was a twenty minute documentary you can check out HERE.  It is a documentary done by Soul Pancake, who I regularly watch, that I just stumbled upon. Zach's story is incredible but his heart for other's in his most desperate times rocked me to tears and to search inside myself for this kind of love and passion for others. Zach said something in that video I will now forever hold on to. To bless others in the way that brings them joy. 

So with that, I prayed that night that God would provide an outright path for me to without a doubt know that I would be bringing someone joy. The next morning I got on Instagram to see what adventures Allie had experienced while I was sleeping in the states. And she posted this picture. 

"Spanish Shoes"

With the hash tag #needshoes and #gottarun. Now, if you don't believe that, that was God fulfilling a prayer in me, you're crazy, but I knew without a doubt the joy that Allie received while running was the opportunity God laid before me to provide her with new real running shoes. I was blown away by my God's immediacy to answer my prayer and so excited to step out in faith to bless my new friend. But the truth is that God did a work in my heart far greater than joy it brought me when Allie started freaking out that I wanted to buy her shoes. After stumbling through the German Nike website and getting the shoes delivered to Allie, He showed me what He meant through His son Jesus. I was given life to rejoice and have a fullness of joy beyond all understanding through all of eternity, because of the beautiful sacrifice of God's love in giving up His son. I don't pretend that the tennis shoes I gave Allie were some great sacrifice, but I can imagine a world where we all step out in faith to bring someone else joy, purely for their joy. Our world would then truly know the love of Christ. Ask God to provide you an opportunity and you surely will not be disappointed."

-Jo

I can’t say how much I love how He works! How He puts the finest details together to make His will happen. On my run I said a short prayer that God would provide me with a new pair of running shoes or finances for some and the next morning I hear from Jo! Every time I lace up my shoes I am reminded of His love, provision and faithfulness. And just how stinkin cool He is! I pray that not only will He continue to bless me with awesome stories of His provision, but even more so will bless relationships with people I love and build their faith in our Father as a good one who loves giving.  Really He does. We only have to be available, have a little faith and take action.

“Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”  -Matthew 7:9-11

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.

Here We Go Again

Hey there family and friends! I am in awe that I am back in Europe writing this. It feels like just yesterday that I hopped on my first plane out of the country. Actually, DTS (Discipleship Training School) seems like a dream that never happened. But it definitely happened and I was definitely changed by the way I encountered God this past year here in Herrnhut, Germany.  

Just a week ago I hugged family and friends goodbye in the airport once again. People ask me if it was any easier this time around, but I would have to answer that it wasn’t easier at all. I don’t think good byes are ever easy. Especially when you have been blessed with an incredible community of family and friends. My heart was heavy as I left. I don’t enjoy knowing that the people who love me worry and miss me. I do not enjoy the fear that gripped me before I went through airport security just as it did the first time, but I know above all that following what my Father has called me to is completely worth it and I pray that the people back home are blessed by the strength God has given me to follow as he leads.  

The weeks I was home flew by so quickly! I apologize if I didn’t get to catch up with you while I was home or didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked with people I did see. I am not perfect and am still learning how to manage time for fundraising, catching up with family and friends and time to relax with a limited amount of time home. But I am doing my best! Your patience, support, grace, encouragement and prayers are incredibly appreciated!

Here is a short look at what I was up to while I was at home through Instagram.

Fun times with Lilly | Ran into Tim Tebow | Lubbock, TX. Color Run with my Roomie | Congresso 2013 | Photo shoots & fundraising for YWAM SOIP | Family Easter | laughs with my Grandpa Felix | Got to know my youngest niece Leiah | Visited my old university and good friends | Spoke to WT NSAC team | Hugged friends | Spoke at WT FCA & good times with best friends | Share my experiences with YWAM at Palce Coffee | Family time | I have a boyfriend =) | Said good bye

This first week that I was over seas I was so excited to spend some time with one of my best friends I made at YWAM. It was a beautiful few days of relaxing and catching up. Exactly what I needed! I am now in Herrnhut where SOIP (School Of Intercessory Prayer) will begins today. God did such awesome things the first time I took a step in faith to attend YWAM, I know He will be faithful to do the same as I focus on growing closer to Him in prayer the next few months. I can not thank everyone enough for their support for me to get back here and continue in missions!

Much love!

-Allie