(Thank You Very Much!)
27 HOURS LATER...
Ah laan! That means hello in Arabic. I am so glad to be home, yet already I miss the people in Egypt. What a wonderful trip! I am excited to share with each of you the work of the Lord that you were able to be a part of by sending me to this wonderful country. God is, as always, amazing and I learned so much about Him and His desire for all of His children to be able to walk with an unveiled face so that others may see His glory. So let me tell you about the trip!
First off let me say shokran (thank you) for your prayers and your financial support! Both meant so much to me! I know that God was hearing your prayers and extending an extra measure of grace to me while I was there. Shokran for being the sending team behind me so that I could bring them the encouragement of the Lord and you could reap blessing from all He did in the past week.
Franny Lowry and I started out early Tuesday morning (about 4:00am Pacific
time) to drive an hour to the airport. We had a four hour flight to Chicago where we had a two hour layover and met two more of our team. We then flew an eight hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany (not Kentucky) where we met the majority of the rest of our team and had another two hour layover. The last leg was another 4 hour flight to Cairo. There we met our national leaders and drove, what took us about 6 hours to the far side of El Minya. 27 hours after we left Ramona, we arrived, at about midnight on Wednesday, and stayed in a private, guarded, Christian conference center where our conference was to be held.
Ah laan! That means hello in Arabic. I am so glad to be home, yet already I miss the people in Egypt. What a wonderful trip! I am excited to share with each of you the work of the Lord that you were able to be a part of by sending me to this wonderful country. God is, as always, amazing and I learned so much about Him and His desire for all of His children to be able to walk with an unveiled face so that others may see His glory. So let me tell you about the trip!
First off let me say shokran (thank you) for your prayers and your financial support! Both meant so much to me! I know that God was hearing your prayers and extending an extra measure of grace to me while I was there. Shokran for being the sending team behind me so that I could bring them the encouragement of the Lord and you could reap blessing from all He did in the past week.
Franny Lowry and I started out early Tuesday morning (about 4:00am Pacific
time) to drive an hour to the airport. We had a four hour flight to Chicago where we had a two hour layover and met two more of our team. We then flew an eight hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany (not Kentucky) where we met the majority of the rest of our team and had another two hour layover. The last leg was another 4 hour flight to Cairo. There we met our national leaders and drove, what took us about 6 hours to the far side of El Minya. 27 hours after we left Ramona, we arrived, at about midnight on Wednesday, and stayed in a private, guarded, Christian conference center where our conference was to be held.THE POWER OF FORGIVENESS
The main purpose of our time in Egypt was to train lay leaders in the churches. We were putting on a discipleship conference and Franny and I were asked to teach our New Life in Christ material which comes in three volumes. So we had to take this material and teach the attendees how to teach it to others. Volume one was very basic Christianity– how to read the Bible, how to pray, how to spend time with God. So we whipped through Volume one quickly. Volume two was a little more in depth and one of the chapters dealt with forgiveness. One of our translators told us that this is a very difficult subject for Egyptians and we would need to spend a little more time on it. In Egyptian culture it is not common to apologize or to forgive. To apologize would be admitting a fault and to forgive
would be a sign of weakness. So we spent much time discussing this subject and answering questions for our class. For the first day and a half there were barely any questions, but when we came to the chapter on forgiveness hands were raised across the room. God was obviously moving in their hearts and Franny, who was teaching at the time, wisely decided to stay on this topic instead of rushing to finish the second volume. God was moving in their lives and His Word was speaking to their hearts– dividing joints from marrow. After the class we noticed two young ladies staying in the chairs talking with each other. When they were done they came and shared with us that they had not spoken to each other in three months because of a fight they were having. Here they were in the same class hearing about how to forgive and they were applying it to their lives immediately! Neither one of them held anymore bitterness towards each other. One even said that since the fight she has not felt connected to God and as she released forgiveness she felt that He heard her prayers again and her heart was again connected to His! GOD IS AWESOME!BOYS WILL BE BOYS
Several of the young men in our class heard about the conference ab
out two hours before it started. They decided to come so that they could hang out with their buddies. Then they heard that there would be young women there so they were really hooked! Once they found out that we had come all the way from America they realized that they better listen because we must have something important to say. During our class we gave some of the students an opportunity to practice being a leader by leading a small group. One of the young men said that as he was preparing to lead, the Lord convicted His heart about the way he was living his life and that he hadn’t fully given up the sin in his life. He realized that if he was going to teach others that he needed to set his heart in line with Jesus and become more Christ like. He committed himself to Jesus and repented of the sin in his life! His pastor had been trying to get him to change for months and God used a single moment to convict his heart because he was given an opportunity to lead others. We found out two weeks after the trip that 3 of these boys accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior!!! Can I say it again? GOD IS AWESOME!GOD’S WORK IN MY HEART
Before I left for Egypt I kept wondering, what is God’s purpose for me on this trip? Am I really going to be beneficial to the Egyptians? How is God going to use me? I wanted to be used by God. However, I soon came to realize that my idea of what being used looked like was very different from God’s idea. Isn’t that always the way it works? On the trip I began hearing people with stories of the amazing things God was doing while they were teaching or praying for someone and I didn’t have a story. The story of the two girls forgiving each other happened when Franny was teaching and I wanted my own story—some proof of how God used me so that I could know that I had purpose on this trip. Friday night that purpose still hadn’t come and I had a slight breakdown. I didn’t have a story of God using me and I didn’t know what my purpose was for the conference. Had I done something wrong? I don’t typically struggle with finding my worth in how God uses me, but it was attacking full force. I went to sleep wondering why I was in Egypt. When I woke up the next morning, clear as day the Lord said, “trust Me.” My heart was filled with peace and I knew that He would use me however He wanted and I may never know until heaven what that looked like. He allowed me to open myself to be used how He saw fit. It no longer mattered whether or not I had a story, what mattered was that God received the glory no matter how He used me.
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