The beauty of trusting the Lord

A group of people from all over the world, going through life separately, not knowing that God hand-picked them to be part of the Global Challenge Missions One Year Expedition. Well… here we are and the adventure has begun.

Throughout the year, we are going to share our experiences and testimonies with you. If you want to follow our journey, stay tuned. We are entrusting ourselves and this year to the Lord and we can’t wait to see what He is going to do.

Here we go!

17 strangers meet

On the first day, everyone put their best foot forward and was faced with transitioning from living with loved ones, to being vulnerable with strangers. We found our own feet quickly, and the journey of understanding one another was underway.

Our first challenge:

Helping Oakridge Academy build and prepare their classrooms before school started.

We had three days to complete this challenge and had to learn to submit and trust our leadership quickly. That’s the beauty of trusting the Lord; your life could change in an instant and surrendering all to Him is what matters. He knows what is best for us.

Looking back and seeing how much we’ve grown in only a few weeks, we realize how little time one needs to adapt and grow. With our first challenge behind us, we were quickly becoming a team; little did we know, that the unity of our team was going to be tested in the week to come.

Our first hike

Surrendering your life to Christ entails being flexible to do what the Holy Spirit leads you to, even if it’s not planned. In training for this, we got the pleasant surprise of our first hike!

During the hike, as a team, we were forced to take every day step by step.  For some people that meant taking each step in silence to process their emotions and for others, it was a spring in their step.  All conversations started off with small talk, like “where are you from” or “what did you study” and by the end of the hike, we knew each other personally through sharing testimonies about what God has done in our lives. Thanks to this, amazing friendships were built. During the harder times, our leader, Uncle Paul, would remind us constantly to surrender and receive our strength from God. 

This time helped us to switch off from everyday life, and spend time in God’s creation by being still in His presence. The hike helped us understand that you are not alone in your struggles, your team is there to lift you up and God is there to lead you.

During the first 6 weeks of our training, a few of us got to share our testimonies publicly and we grew closer as a team.  We had the amazing opportunity to lead worship at church, which here at Global Challenge they call ‘Celebration’, and really rejoiced in celebrating the Lord with the body of Christ. We are so excited to see where God will lead us to worship next!

Veritas

In preparing for our year in the nations, we had the privilege to do Veritas Module 1. Our knowledge of the bible deepened and brought clarity to a bunch of questions we were still pondering on.

Ronen, one of our team members, had the following to say about his experience in Veritas Module 1:

“becoming more like Jesus also means spending more time in His word. During our two weeks of Veritas training, I was heavily convicted of being more intentional in memorizing scripture. Making sure that I’m not only familiar with the word of God, but that His word dwells richly in me. I want to share this conviction so that I might encourage anyone to have the discipline to commit to memorizing scripture. Even if it’s a couple of verses at a time.”

Veritas changed many of our perspectives on how we read our bible and taught us the importance of the context in which it was written.

Now, knowledge is important to have, but you need to apply that knowledge at some point and put it to the test. Our team was invited to join GLA (Global Leadership Academy) on colour camps! We spent time ministering to GLA’s learners and led them in worship. During the camps, the teams got to experience a little bit of adventure by going on hikes, swimming in rivers and sharing testimonies. The learners shared some of their everyday struggles with our team and this gave us the opportunity to speak truth into their lives and love them like Jesus loves.

The next week started with a visit to a local school where we got to spend time with the learners. We witnessed some of them give their lives to Christ and we got to see the Holy Spirit move. Our team shared some testimonies and messages which lead to deep and intimate conversations.

There was a group of grade 12 young men who prayed for each other in unity, and as you might know, a lot of men struggle to be vulnerable emotionally, but the Holy Spirit helped them to express what they were feeling internally. Praise the Lord!

The local school ministry was amazing and many of us were still processing what happened when we found out that we are going on a Luke 10 challenge! Here’s what some members of our team had to say about it.

Pierre:
“Something that stood out for me during training is definitely our Luke 10 journey. We saw how the Lord provided in so many ways, we had amazing opportunities to share and pray for people we met along the way. I was personally challenged in trusting God completely, but I realized how much freedom there is when we rely and trust in Him for everything.”

Ronen:
“It was only during our debrief that I realised that ministry (and life in general) will never be about what we do, but about what God is doing. We are merely vessels of His love.”

Carike:
“Even during the times that I felt helpless, my spirit was lifted instantly when we started worshipping. We thought that people might think we’re crazy, but I’m proud to say that we’re crazy for Jesus.”

The Root and Fruit of Pride and Live to Love

Asking Jesus to make us more like Him is easy, but it takes a lot of work and intentionality. The Root and Fruit of Pride, by Floyd McClung, had a massive impact on us, because we were convicted about the pride in our hearts. The sessions made many of us aware of the self-righteous lives we had.

The other course we did was Live to Love by Norm Wakefield. This course helped us break the boxes we put God in and realized that there is more to Christianity than we thought. Now, we are eager to expand our horizon of knowledge in the Lord, to love people the same way Jesus loves and let God shine His light in the darkness through Jesus in us.

The first leg of training has almost come to an end. We are now preparing for the nations with more intention than before as our departure date is around the corner!

Makhathini, Mozambique, Eswatini and Johannesburg, here we come!