Hi friends,
Welcome back to the blog! Guess what! Addison and I went on a mission trip last week. The Lord is so faithful and we both learned so much. Make sure to listen to the podcast this week to hear about our experiences. This post will be a summary of what I learned because I am writing this before we record.
The biggest lesson I learned on the trip is the Lord provides. He provides open doors, relationships, and safety.
The first two days of the mission trip, I did not have many gospel conversations. Our group went door to door evangelizing and not many people opened their doors for us to talk with them. I started to feel discouraged and was talking to God about it. I realized that I was seeking the wrong things on the mission trip. I wanted doors to be opened so I could tell people about Jesus and I could be their hero. The Lord taught me that I needed to decrease and the Lord needed to increase.
During this trip, I created amazing relationships with the other participants on the trip as well as with local church members. I was encouraged to hear other people’s stories of how the Lord has worked in their lives. I am thankful for the conversations I had and the relationships that were built.
One of the ways I saw the Lord provide was actually on our way home. Our bus broke down and we were stranded for four hours before we could continue our journey home. My immediate reaction was to worry and complain. After I got home though, I realized how cool this experience was. We happened to break down on a city road after lunch, not on the highway. The bus worked long enough for us to pull into a parking lot. This lot was full of restaurants, a grocery store, and a coffee shop. We had everything we needed to get through the wait.
This is a small and somewhat silly story to tell you. There are many more amazing stories I could share about our trip. I chose to write about this one for a specific reason though. I probably would have not noticed those details if I had not spent the past week on a mission trip. This trip taught me to open my eyes to the ways God works every single day. If you find yourself feeling distant from God like I do sometimes, I encourage you to stop and ask yourself, have I been spending time with God and noticing Him in the everyday. Our sole focus on this mission trip was glorifying God and we saw the small and big ways He worked this week. I learned the work that God does is not just during a one-week mission trip, rather in my everyday life.
You don’t have to go on a mission trip to experience God’s love, faithfulness, and provision. It takes paying attention to God’s voice and surrendering your life to glorify God.
I hope you guys have a good week, praying for you.
My heart,
Sophie
