Guess Who’s Growing!

GUYS!! What is up!? 

First off, I am so sorry for my lack of blogs, y’all. It has been such a busy couple of weeks that I truly struggled sitting down and letting you guys know what has been going on when I hardly had time to process myself.

I love all of you so much and think about y’all every day. With that being said, I’ve spent a lot of time with the Lord over the last couple days and I’ve had some time to process and it’s time to share 🙂

The last month has been packed and I’ve been just rocked by the Lord. Currently, I am reading a book called The Art of Listening Prayer by Seth Barnes (he is also the founder of the World Race), and it has been so encouraging for my conversations with God. It is styled as a devotion and has really given me some good direction with conversation starters and directed me to actually pause during my prayer and listen for an answer. This may sound dumb to some or maybe if you’re like me it will be new news…. but did y’all know you could actually ask God what He thinks? Or what He wants? And that He will actually answer? I brought this to one of my teammates and he was like “You didn’t realize that?? Lilli that’s literally the best part!” and we both laughed it off but that was so wild to me.

However, it has been a learning process- as all things are- because it requires a lot of patience. Waiting for a response from God can be difficult because there’s no telling in how He will speak to you. Some of my squad-mates have heard an audible voice come from the Lord, some of us get visions or He comes to us in dreams, some have clear discernment and can just feel when a thought comes from Jesus rather than their own thoughts. Though, there is no limits to the ways God can speak, a lot of the time you just have to bring it back to the Truth and give it a shot. God will never contradict himself. 

I have been integrating myself more in listening prayer and I have began to hear more from the Lord through visions since I asked Him to speak to me in clear ways that I can understand. I’m very much a visual learner and processor so He definitely knew how to reach me best haha. 

So, what am I up to? 

We were just in Kentucky for the last two weeks serving with Samaritan’s Purse: US Disaster Relief, serving the town of Jackson after they were struck with a 2nd disastrous flood within the last two years. It was an incredible experience to say the least. While we were absolutely there to help families and individuals begin to rebuild their homes, our number one priority was to care for the homeowners and get to know them and their story. 

Our daily schedules were pretty full: we would wake up around 5:30 and not have any time to ourselves until about 7:30 at night. However, I haven’t felt such joy in a very long time, the Holy Spirit was just moving and I felt so positive all the time. Even though we were exhausted from constantly working, God was just filling us with this crazy energy and kept us going each day. It was so cool! It was more than enough to keep me motivated while I was covered in black mold, and were nearly throwing up from some of the smells.

But don’t get me wrong, the circumstances were heavy. There were quite a bit of casualties and it’s a really small town, so more than likely every person in that town had been affected in great ways. Some people’s entire house was submerged with water. There’s a little creek (river?) that runs through the town and it raised about 47′ I’m pretty sure. Absolutely insane. It was hard but when we’d get the chance to speak with homeowners and present them with the Good News or even remind those who have forgotten, there was a light that reentered their eyes and it was so beautiful. 

I met one girl named Bri, she’s a freshmen and I got to know her a little when we went to a local high school football game and I continued to talk to her over the second week we were there. It was so encouraging because she had brought up that even though this flood was so heart wrenching, it brought the town together, and even working with Samaritan’s Purse, she was reminded of the joy of the Lord and is now more encouraged to have a personal relationship with the Father. 

My sentence to describe the experience: There’s a beautiful kind of joy in such brokenness.

Also something we realized, joy doesn’t automatically mean happy; therefore, we can always have joy 😉

Throughout the last few weeks I’ve had some scripture stuck in my head like a broken record- in the best way possible! It’s Romans 5:3-5:

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us

I have told this verse to almost every homeowner I had spoken to because it brought light to my darkest times, and I wanted to pass that little light along. To me, this passage really continues to show how the Lord continues to comfort us in our greatest sufferings. We aren’t alone to “deal” with these problems ourselves and just pray that we’ll make it out the other side. But we are praying that God may use these struggles to produce endurance within us and make us stronger. I always like to say that our definition of good and God’s definitions of good are very very different. So in that sense, there is good that can come out of everything. Another thing I heard once that I love to keep in my pocket “there is good in everything, even when not everything seems good”. 

Some other fun news- Kaleya, Matthew, and myself were given the roles of storytellers for the squad! I’m super excited about this opportunity because I believe that telling the stories of our racers and of the communities we’ll be working alongside with over the next 8 months will be able to encourage others that God really is working all over the world 🙂 Basically, Matthew and I will be more in charge of taking pictures and videos, Kaleya will be creating a monthly newsletter, and I will be trying to put together YouTube videos as often as I can 🙂 

Looking forward…… WE ARE 3 DAYS AWAY FROM BEING IN NICARAGUA!!!!

We will be staying the night at the airport Friday night, then flying out Saturday morning, and then to get to the final destination we will have like a 13 hour bus ride… yay.. 😉 

Anyway thanks for reading, I love and miss everyone SO MUCH !!!!! 

Loveeeeee,

Lilli <3

enjoyyyyyyy