My Strength in Life is: I am Yours.: 2012

Today marks the 11^th day of outreach. We started out our ten week journey by travelling 10 hours up the east coast of Australia to a beautiful town called Byron Bay. We drove into what seemed to be a town filled with passion and excitement with the streets packed full of adventure hungry teens and adults. The anticipation of what we were about to step into was overwhelming. All we knew was that this town needed Jesus and we were the people who would be used to deliver this message to them.

Being in Byron reminded me a lot of a town back home called Paia. It was a town powered by a beach culture wildly mixed with hippies and careless i-don’t-give-a-crap individuals, along with genuine soft-hearted, Jesus loving, God fearing people. But the surprising thing for me was that when I first stepped into this town, I didn’t really see all of the hurt and pain that was going on. When I first laid my eyes on the people of this town, I didn’t see people who were “bad” or “crazy” or even “ungodly”. All I saw was a town filled with a huge sense of HOPE. Hope for redemption. Hope for a future. Hope to come out of the messy lifestyle that they were living in. It was like for the first time in my life I was seeing through God’s eyes. Don’t get me wrong… yes, I did see a generation of people who were finding satisfaction the wrong things. My heart broke for them. My heart broke for the people who didn’t know that they can find that complete satisfaction in a God who delights in them, and whose love NEVER fails. But, I saw a group of people who were so hungry for love that they were willing to find it anywhere. And they were soo caught up in finding that love and acceptance in things that would never deliver that.

It was mind blowing for me to talk to people in this town. The moment I brought up the name of Jesus or God, it was like a trigger went off in their brain and words just came spewing out. They were soo thirsty to hear about and talk about God. I was able to share the gospel and my testimony to a countless amount of people. I even got to share with a man from Italy about the story of Jesus for the first time in his life!

Throughout this past week and half of outreach, God has really just been reminding me of the verse in Psalm 46:10-

“BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD.”

Just to remind myself that even though it is awesome being able to be used by God in ways that I never thought would be possible… I still have to take time and just be still and know that God IS God. And without Him, none of this would be possible.

Today we travelled even further up north to Brisbane. We will be staying here for a couple days and then will be travelling inland to Toowoomba. On the 12^th we will then head back down to Newcastle for a couple hours and then head to the airport to go to CAMBODIA! I am so excited for these next two months, I can barely handle it. And even though I miss so many people who aren’t here with me, I can hold onto the peace knowing that this is exactly where God wants me to be right now. And I am so blessed to have the opportunity to do this, and to be able to see the fruit that is coming from our ministry time here.

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