Thursday, September 22, 2011

Nothing is ever too big.

The past week has just been one giant testament to God’s faithfulness and provision here in Herrnhut. We began a journey of faith on Wednesday evening of last week. We called it a Faith Walk, where we split into lots of small teams of four or five people and left Herrnhut with one euro each. Myself and 4 others hitch hiked to the small nearby town of Bautzen and started looking for people to bless in whatever way we could. Logically, we should have expected to spend every night out in parks and under trees, with one person watching to make sure no one stole any of our stuff. But no, God led us to a roof over our heads and food in our stomaches every single night of the walk.

Some of the highlights from the trip included...
-Spending the 3 nights at 3 different places: a youth hostel, an “attenheim” or elderly home, and a church.
-Meeting Khalid, the Pakistani restaurant owner who gave us not one, but two meals, dinner the first night and lunch the next day, for absolutely nothing.
-Getting to know the different people on my team, two other Americans, one guy from England, and one girl from Germany
-Blessing the people at the attenheim by joining in at their autumn festival, serving them dinner, making strawberry banana mush, and taking them on a walk
-Meeting Kaas and his wonderful family. Kaas and his wife are the leaders of the church we stayed in the last night. They are originally from Holland and are tri-lingual, which means we could actually converse with them in English (the rest of the trip was spent saying things to our one German speaker and having her translate for us). Their whole family lives together, three generations all under one roof.
-Handing out fliers to young people all over Bautzen advertising a youth service at the church
-Little comforts such as coffee every morning, showers every morning, safe places to store our backpacks/sleeping bags/passports, and beds on our last night.

Everyone came back together on Saturday around dinner time and we had a time of just sharing all the ways that we saw God moving throughout the country. Some people went as far as Berlin, others left the country completely and went to the Czech Republic and Poland. We saw a few other teams around Bautzen, a lot of teams ended up spending their first night together at the train station in Löbau under a tree. Some really cool things happened like miracle Nutella, and some not so fun things happened, like sleeping outside and being chased away by the police. But I didn’t hear a single person who came back wishing that they hadn’t gone.

We got some real sleep over the weekend, have been having some really awesome lectures with Andy Byrd, our guest speaker. Right now he’s working at the YWAM base in Kona, Hawaii, but I found out that he was one of the instrumental people in getting the YWAM base up and running in Lebanon, PA, so he used to live there. It’s a small world.

But the best part of the week happened this morning during our time of intercession ands prayer. The Justice DTS is preparing to leave for outreach in just one week. There are three teams going to Nepal, Cambodia, and Kenya, and none of them had enough money. Some people hadn’t even paid off their lecture fees yet, so we had a time just to pray for them and ask God to provide. And then they invited anyone who felt called to give money to them to come and do so. They wrote on the white board how much each person needed, and the total was well over 15,000 euros. Which is well over $20,000. In one hour, as we praised God for the money we all knew He would provide we raised the entire amount, plus a few hundred dollars. Every single team had all the money that they needed to go on outreach, from 150 missionaries. Missionaries blessing missionaries. It was so beautiful.

When I saw all the thousands of euros needed on that white board, I never thought that we would be able to raise it all, I mean we all have our own lecture and outreach fees to pay yet. But suddenly people who had close to 2,000 euros of debt had a surplus of 1,600, enough to pay for all the other members of their team. By the end of the hour every cent was paid off, which almost never happens for any DTS that leaves the Herrnhut base.

God is real and He wants us to know that. He is faithful and he will provide. We have been so blessed, and now that blessing becomes our gift to the world. We are blessed to be a blessing.

If you have any questions or want to hear more about the faith walk please e-mail me, I would love to give more details!

Until next time!
Charlene

No comments:

Post a Comment