First of all, I’m writing this to you while on a 41 hour train ride. This ride, as fun as it sounds, wasn’t on my bucket-list and it shouldn’t be on any of yours! Anyways, a bunch of awesome stuff has happened, most of the stuff I can’t literate short enough so it’ll have to be thoroughly explained later. But I will share with you one cool story that has to be one of my favorite times so far this year.
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We held a ‘man night’ for some of our guys (that are followers) where we studied around the passage that talks about “Iron sharpening iron” and then we did a bunch of other cool manly things that men do… It was a great study and 4 of my guys came and really got involved. The really cool part though came at the end, when one our other friends shared a feeling he had that we needed to lift up someone’s Mom. At first I assumed this word was for one of the other guys in the room. I thought in my head “This will be cool, I will be able to relate with them cause my mom is going through something tough too!”. But then when the silence hit and everyone was shaking their head that it wasn’t for them, I knew this word/feeling was for me. So I let the guys know what was happening in the life of my family and they surrounded me and interceded for Mom right there. All 4 of those guys are brand new followers and we were still working on getting them pray in their native language. That night in that circle all 4 of those guys lifted me up in their own language. I had no idea what they even said but at that moment I could feel that their capacity for God’s love was so vast. I saw them experience God’s love working through them for the first time… It became so clear to me that God was using my Mother’s trial to bring about growth in my 4 dudes, blew me away. It’s so cool when you don’t see it coming, you just blink and it’s there. How awesome is our God and his beautiful love.
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I love to dwell on that moment as it encourages me forward. In the present though, we will have a few weeks of training as we wait for people to come back from winter break. Please keep in mind these 4 guys specifically as they are spread out all over the nation right now, and with their families. We really want to keep them on fire and encouraged as they head into this next semester.