Hello everyone!
Thank you for all of your prayers, notes of encouragement, and support! I am so blessed by all of you. I am excited to share with you which countries I will be going to on my upcoming missions trip. I will be leaving in August 2021 and recently I have been enjoying getting to know some of my teammates who will be going with me through texting and Zoom meetings. Adventures in Missions (my missions trip organization) has made some changes to the structure of the World Race. I will still be going for 11 months, but instead of going to 11 countries, they have created what is called a Hub Model of International Engagement. I will be going to 5 Hub countries where my team will be trained specifically for each region and then from there we may have some opportunities to go to some of the neighboring countries as well. (This will be dependent on what the World looks like in about 9 months).
What countries will I be going to? I am glad you asked 🙂
#1
Location: Mijas, Spain
Ministry: G42/ Trekking El Camino de Santiago
Focus: Spiritual Formation, Discipleship, Trekking Ministry, Evangelism
#2
Location: Craiova, Romania
Ministry: HOPE Church Romania
Focus: Evangelism, Student Ministry, Children’s Ministry, Community Outreach, Church Planting
#3
Location: Kyrgyzstan
Focus: Student Ministry, Unreached People Groups
#4
Location: South Asia
Ministry: Adventures in Missions Base
Focus: Church Planting, Unreached People Groups, Special Needs Ministry
#5:
Location: Chiang Mai, Thailand
Ministry: Adventures in Missions Thailand Base
Focus: Church Planting, Anti Trafficking Ministry, Unreached People Groups
If you would like to read more about my specific route or Adventures in Missions’ vision for the Hub model→ World Race August 2021 Expedition
It is different from the route that I thought I would be going on, but I am so excited about all of these opportunities and the amazing people who I am meeting in the process!
As some of you know, I have just spent the last 3 weeks quarantined in my house. In this time I found myself in a sudden and unexpected change to my day-to-day schedule. I went from working full time to not being able to work at all and had to stay in my house for 21 days. If you know me, you know that I love structure and schedules and all of a sudden all of my plans and my day-to-day activities were thrown out the window for a time. During this time spent in quarantine, I found myself starting my day by reminding myself of the character and nature of God. I would remind myself that I will continually set my gaze on Him because He is faithful to my heart. In every season, He is faithful. His nature doesn’t change even though my circumstances unexpectedly had. This led me to think about the nature of God. How we can know Him and His attributes, yet never fully grasp His fullness. We can spend our whole lives learning about who He is yet never run out of things to learn. He is relational but deeper than I could ever grasp. He is more than I can ever understand, more creative, more beautiful, more loving than my human imagination can fathom. As I was thinking about the nature of God, I kept coming back to the thought that God is better than I can dream. This idea kept coming back to me in sermons I would listen to, songs, and books that I am reading. I kept coming back to this concept that God is bigger and better than I can ever dream Him to be. I finally asked myself the question, what if I lived my life with this mindset and looked at life through this lens that God is better than I can dream? What would my faith look like? What would my faith look like if I believe that He is better than I can dream, more loving than I can fathom, more beautiful than I can imagine? Holding on to both the immensity of His greatness, yet the simplicity of the relationship. He is an intimate Father and beautifully intriguing in ways that I can never understand. He is so much more than I can ever comprehend, yet I can still know Him.
This led me to think about how if I truly believe this, I have to apply this to not only the good times, but also the uncomfortable, the difficult, and the challenging. In every season, God is still better than I can imagine Him to be. I have been reading A.W. Tozer’s book, The Pursuit of God, and in it, he writes that “God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is”. In every season of our lives, God has everything we need. I’ll be honest, quarantining was very difficult for me at times, but I was able to grow in dependency and trust in God’s faithfulness and His friendship. I learned a little bit more about surrendering control and the Lord was speaking to me about how my prayers for dependency were being answered in this season.
A great article that has challenged my faith and my prayers for the last few years→ Seven Ways to Pray for your Heart
So, if you made it this far, thanks for reading my quarantine thoughts. How can I be praying for you? Let me know! (530) 710-4395.
–Elizabeth
