God gave me the overwhelmingly awesome privilege to join a team of believers from Faith Mountain and Grace Fellowship of Lakewood churches and travel down to spread God's love on the Navajo Reservation near Chinle, AZ the first week in June. I'd like to share with you a little bit about how God worked on our trip, but first I would like to share how God was working on my heart personally before the trip even began.
As many of you probably know, I was unable to get a teaching job my first year out of college. Although at first this seemed like a huge, devastating thing, God taught me sooooo much through this past year and I was able to focus on drawing even closer in relationship with Him in the extra free time that I was blessed with since I was only working part time. In my position as an instructional aide, I was able to experience so many different teaching styles and develop relationships with so many diverse students across grade levels that I would have been unable to do if I had my own class of students to focus on. Although my job this past year was a huge blessing and I grew so much through it, as the school year drew to a close I still found myself wanting my own classroom so badly, because teaching is where my passion really is.
The month of March rolled around, and I had to start praying a lot so that anxiety about getting a job didn't overtake me. My sister had started talking about the annual Navajo mission trip, and how she was gonna go this summer. I really wanted to go, but felt like for some reason my heart wasn't in it. I told our good Navajo friends Mildred and Trasi that I had to keep praying about it because I just wasn't sure yet if it was what God had planned for me. I continued to pray some about it. It was always kind of in the back of my mind, but my biggest fear about going was that I would be away for a week without cell service and would miss a call for an interview which would end in me not getting a job again. I started to realize that I needed to give this fear up to God. If He wanted me to have my own classroom next year, He would make a way for that to happen-choosing to go and serve on a mission trip would not keep me from that! I began to feel like I was trusting God more with the whole job situation, but still didn't feel that "calling" that I was supposed to go on the trip. I didn't want it to be a choice I was making just because I wanted to, but because it was something I felt really strongly God wanted me to do.
Over the past few months, God has really been laying on my heart that I need to be more excited and confident about sharing my faith with people around me. For some reason, even though I can be a really talkative and outgoing person, I get so scared to bring up God in conversation out of fear of what people will think of me. This was something else that I began to pray for around the beginning of March: that I would really see and feel the Holy Spirit's empowering through my weakness and be able to overcome this fear through His strength. I had been praying about all of these different things, but for some reason every time I prayed about the Navajo trip and what God's will for me there was, I felt a block in my mind. Like I really didn't believe I was ever going to get a clear answer on what God's "will" was for me in this situation. Well, on the morning of March 15th, I was actually praying for the believers in Ghana from my trip last year, when God chose to speak to me. I heard very clearly to go on this trip, because He wanted to develop in me courage for sharing the gospel with those around me. I knew this would be an awesome opportunity and that God was going to show me so much of Himself through this. I immediately texted Mildred and Trasi and told them I was going, and that was just the beginning of the adventure!
To be continued.... :-)
