“So What are You Actually Doing There?”

Hi friends! Thank you thank you thank you for taking a peak at my blogs!!!!!! WELCOME! 

My current location: Gainesville, Georgia at the adventures in missions base (aka beautifully the middle of no where). I’ll be here until mid December && my squad is planning on launching in January to do international missions for six months!

So the question you might be asking is, “What the heck are you doing in Gainesville??” && in short i’m here to do discipleship training. I get to dedicate 3.5 months of my life with no other obligation but to get to fall deeper in love with the Lord and my squad of 32 people! How kind of the Lord to lead me here!!!!

On the weekdays our schedule looks like: breakfast, individual devotional time to sit with the Lord, sessions (some very wise men and women that we get to learn about God from!), lunch, rotations (depending on the day laundry, squad time, cleaning, showers, free time, exercise ect.), dinner, team time (gratitude night, feedback, game night, debrief, ect).

We also have church every weekend together led by one of our teams! Saturday’s have very minimal plans as we get to prepare for Sunday which is dedicated to sabbath, meaning a day with no plans so that we can rest && get refilled by the Lord however that looks for us individually. 

There’s been plenty of spontaneous worship nights, watercolor sessions, movie nights, vending machine runs, exploring this gorgeous (GORGEOUS) campus, running the trails, corners to read my book in the sunshine, and picking wildflowers to press in our bibles.  

But I’m sitting here writing out our daily schedule and realize it doesn’t even come close to explaining the ways the Lord is moving in our hearts here on campus. It just doesn’t do my time here justice. As my team leader Leanna wrote so beautifully in her blog, “Something I get asked all the time is ‘Leanna, what are you actually doing?’ I wish i had words to fully explain everything, but hey that’s kingdom!! I am simply being obedient in what the Lord is asking me to do every single day. I show up and He does the rest. I am content with where he has me. It might not look like much, but THIS IS MORE THAN I COULD EVER IMAGINE.” 

Our hearts are in construction here; a wonderfully painful process sometimes. lots of  breaking, healing, molding, and building of ideas, perspectives, mindsets, and heart postures. These things happen in the beauty of a fruitful conversation, in solitude in the middle of the woods, waking up in my tent knowing that it is 30 degrees outside and getting up is the last thing I want to do, in sessions led by wise disciples of God. It’s the in betweens, the spontaneous, the intentional. 

But I don’t want to end the blog here because I realized often we like to hold loudly and post about all the amazing things here, but choosing to be here came with a high price. 

You see the sun shining through the bright n golden green trees that line campus;I see the rainy days when our tents flood, our clothes stay wet for days and become moldy, and we have to tote our sleeping pads from our tents to shelter for the third night in a row because of the last minute decision to sleep inside. 

You see the lovely wooden porch we hang out on with pretty lights that line the ceiling; I see the porta potties that sometimes smell from a mile away because they are so full all while I reminisce on the fact that I haven’t flushed a toilet or turned a faucet on for over a month and that I take showers inside a giant storage container that is very iffy on when it wants to provide warm water. 

You see my team dressed up for church in pretty dresses holding bundles of wildflowers; I see the times when tears streak our faces, when we are wearing the same clothes for a week in a row cause everything else smells rancid, and all we long for is the people we left back at home. 

Ihis is our cost of discipleship. 

&& the beautiful thing is that it’s not an “I have to” give these things up but an “I get to” give these things up. The Lord allowed us the choice to let go of our comfort, our people, our home, our desires, our plans, and replace it all with kingdom. KINGDOM!!! an opportunity that I nearly missed because i was so worried about my own plans and coming to fruition.

wow.

Thank you Abba for being better than my dreams.