Team Coming!

This weekend has been crazy and stressful. I got back from Nicaragua late Thursday night, from my mandatory visa renewal trip, and I haven’t really stopped since. Tomorrow at noon, a volleyball team of 12 from Clearwater Christian University will be here to work with my girls. They will also do 2 evangelism events at the National University and play a game or two of volleyball with the university.

Please be in prayer as I lead the team for the next eight days. Pray for the communication barrier, the relationships between the team and the girls, strength and endurance. Please pray for how the week will go. The team’s vision is different from what they are going to be able to do, which they know, but pray that they will be amazed at what God has called them to.

For myself, please pray for strength as I lead them, translate for the week, and for my health as I’m very allergic to the house we will stay in. Pray that I will be sensitive to the Lord’s leading and that I will be able to find moments of rest during the busy week ahead.

Hope is Stirring!

Last week, I wrote a blog about one of my girls who believes that the devil is god and that God does not exists. Every week I have talked with her for about 30 minutes to try to work on this with her. Today, I was not looking forward to talking with her; I just wanted no more stress. Oh but how wrong I was!

This precious girl is giving into God’s pursuit of her. She has found herself from time to time writing poems and when she goes back and reads them it’s as if it was a message from God, Himself, to her about her situation. She’s still not convinced but she admits that He probably does exist but she’s very confused. She feels like He doesn’t listen to her, yet I was able to point out all the ways He has been responding to her.

Last night after the night of praise and worship she told God that she was very alone and sad and she really needed a hug. Just a hug from Him. She said that there had been no wind last night, but at that moment as she was heading down to the cabins, a rush of wind wrapped itself around her. She said “it might be strange for me to say this but I think it was God.” I told her that she was so right that it was God. She couldn’t believe that I was saying it.

I’m so encouraged to see a heart softening before my eyes and seeing God personally pursue this young lady and she’s letting Him in a little at a time. I have no doubt, that your prayers are helping this beautiful soul take one step closer to finding everlasting life in the arms of our amazing Savior. Please continue to pray for her and for us as God has given us the huge work of guiding her to Him. I just can’t quit smiling! My God is wonderful!

God's Provision

¡¡What a day!! The first hour of my morning was like any other morning but the second hour brought a mountain of stress which I thought was going to crush me. First I’m already at maximum stress level because I have a team coming on 1 August and things are still up in the air on a lot of it; then on 1 August, as well, I will have no roommates; and on 24 July I have to go to Nicaragua again to renew my visa and am trying to prepare three weeks worth of lessons for two cabins along with the lessons I must teach next week. Wow I’m just stressed out by typing all that.

So back to the second hour of today. I needed a Pepsi badly, I’m trying to quit (again) and so I only had my debit card and so I used it, or tried to. Back up to last night. I went and bought a birthday gift for one of my girls here and used my card without any problem. Five minutes later I tried to use it at McD’s but it wouldn’t work. I’d thought it strange but whatever. Well today my card would not work again. Now this was really strange. I went to the ATM and it worked, but I thought the screen told me I had no money in my account, the screen was very blurry so I couldn’t really tell you what it said. Yet, it let me have money.

This created panic in me. Did someone steal my number, again? Did my bank cancel my card without telling me? What is going on? Last time this happened it took me almost 2 months to get my card mailed to me here which meant I had no access to money for that whole time! This was killing me. How was I going to go to Nicaragua? How was anything going to happen?

I went up in the van to work and everyone knew something was very wrong with me. It just so happened that,(God),two of the girls had doctor appointments and the van was going back down and would later return to work. So I asked my boss if I could go back down and try to solve the issue.

When I looked at my account, everything was at it should be and so I was very confused. I called the back and they told me they hadn’t received any notice of my card being denied so it had to be on this end of things. She thinks my card strip is just getting worn out. But in the process of us talking she asked me if a week ago I attempted to by airline tickets with delta for an amount over $2500. Uhhh, NO! Thankfully it was denied, because I don’t have near that type of money in my account. She was able to find out that it had been manually put in, which means through the internet, which means Someone has my number!

We had to cancel my card as quickly as possible before they could do some damage to me. She gave me an hour to go to the ATM and get out the money I would need until I could get my card before she would cancel my card. Again it just so happens that,(God), I have a team coming down on 1 August. I asked her if she could send it to the leader of the team and she said she couldn’t because I don’t live there and it would be sent back. But what she would do is have it sent to her, by next Wednesday, and then she would put it in another envelope and send it to the leader of the team who will get it just in the nick of time to bring it to me! Praise God!

God used my card not working to bring to light that someone has my number and has tried to use it. I’m glad to see He was protecting me of something major from happening. Next time I hope He does it with a little less stress being involved.

Raging War

This week started off super rough! First I had a great weekend with God, but a very hard one as He and I are working through some hard areas of my life and I’m having to rage war against satan and the lies he’s trying to get me to believe and the cycle I find myself in constantly. Then Monday came, the first hour of work I find out that two of our girls ran away on Sunday.

This wouldn’t have been such a huge surprise if it were some from the beginning phases who were struggling. No, it was one of the most advanced girls in the program who had been here for over a year. She had been doing great, working hard, growing and falling in love with Jesus, just fun to be around. The other was a girl who graduated several years ago and has been living here ever since because she has no place to go.

Sadly these girls ran away and what’s even worse is that they have no place to go. Both have no family, no one involved in their process. I’m terrified for the first girl because she lived by prostitution and I’m afraid she will fall back into that habit. I’m praying that they both will remember what they have learned here and that those things will flood their minds and that they will look for a church to help them.

Right after that I found out that another girl who graduated over several years ago, and has been living with us for the same reasons, no place to go, her brother was released from jail last week and over the weekend was murdered. This was her last hope she had for a possible way out of here. Now she feels like God hates her, is picking on her and so forth.

Then Tuesday, was just a hard day. (Thankfully I had a great night’s sleep because I went to bed at 7:30pm, I was just drained of everything.) I had the conversation with the girl I told you about in the last post. I began the series with Débora (3rd phase) over heaven and hell, angels, demons, satan, spiritual warfare of our minds and the armor of God. This will last for the next 5 weeks and satan always hates these lessons and tries to mess things up. It went pretty well so I felt good until I taught Ester (2nd phase) and the lesson on prayer.

Ester is a hard group right now. There are several girls who really want to learn but the rest are indecisive and then there´s two, three, that are causing HUGE problems. I had to call the group out last week on their attitudes in class which seem to have some impact. However there is a girl who I wrote about in an early blog who accepted Christ as her Savior and transformed immediately. Unfortunately, she now hates God and doesn’t believe in Him and has returned back to her satanic beliefs.

There is another girl who was doing great in her process and was such a joy to be around and was growing in her identity in God. (I’m not sure if she has a relationship with God but she had been seeking.) Well she and the other girl have “fallen in love” and now she does whatever the other girl (with the satanic beliefs) does. So now she is hateful, depressed, cutting on herself, hates God, doesn’t believe in Him, and just causing problems. But when you get her one on one the girl who she really is shows up a little.

It just broke my heart yesterday as they affected the rest of the class. I pray over that room and that class and I kick satan out of there but then they bring him right in with them. I had them on each side of me and the darkness that I felt was just awful and sickening. It took everything in me to not cry. I left very discouraged but trying to live in the promises of God. He is in control.

If you think of it will you pray for this cabin, Ester, and for the spiritual warfare that is being raged on campus, in the lives of these girls and even in myself.

"The devil is god"

What? How can I write something like that? Last week this is what one of my girls told me. After lunch we talked because she wants to get out of the pacts she has made with the devil. She has spent a lot of time in the satanic church, black magic, sacrifices etc. She has given her soul, her blood, her life, her mind to satan for in return for things to happen, get more drugs, have something bad happen to an enemy and so on. She feels that these pacts cause her a lot of anxiety and leads her to cutting herself.

The problem is that she wants nothing to do with God. She doesn’t believe that He exist. In fact, she believes that satan is god and he created everything and has all the power while God is someone that people made up to feel better. Every time she asks me something about God or the Bible and after my response she will immediately and defiantly say "that’s not true."

Yesterday, she and I talked about the hierarchy of God, satan, angels and demons. As expected she refused to hear it. She has so many conflicting statements. “I want out of the pacts because it leads me to cutting myself, anxiety and it causes pain.” Then just a few minutes later she is talking about how she wants to go to hell because it’s a good place, "there’s suffering and pain, it’s satisfying, feels good and fulfills me." Wow.

I asked her a lot of questions to challenge the notion that perhaps her idea of satan could be incorrect if there was a God and if the Bible were correct. She was able to say she has a lot of fear to believe in God and what it would mean for her.

Just an hour later, I had Bible study with her cabin, in which we talked about prayer and I had different activities for them to do, so they could learn that they can pray in many different ways. She was not looking forward to it but she ended up really working on it. One was to draw a picture of how they feel, how their heart, what are their fears, their desires and so forth. Her picture was many black with a cross and question marks. She then asked me what color would represent hope. I told her perhaps yellow and then in the middle of her page she put a yellow dot. Yeah God!

Today she talked with one of my co-workers about if God is all powerful why then are there bad things in the world and why did He allow them to happen to her. She also asked what she would have to do to accept Christ as her Savior but she is not ready to do such. She was saddened when she found out that just like everything else in life; a relationship with Christ is also a process. She wants a quick fix to her bad dreams, hurt and everything else, so she walks away still unwilling to change. However with a little more information, a little more glimpse of what could be. I just pray for the day when she believes that God exists and that she wants Him as her Savior. What a day that will be!