We started our outreach in the old capital named Siem Reap, we had planned to stay there for two weeks teaching english. there were plenty of classes needing to be taught and kids to be played with, so we started with dividing up everything up between everyone. In the end I got pre-school every morning at 7:30 till 10:30 teaching them their ABC's, and two older class teaching more the basics of conversations and such. Now that might not seem like a lot and it really isn't but maybe it was more to do with being across the world with a team I didn't overly feel comfortable with (I'll explain that soon). Everything seemed okay, I was able to have lots of quite times with God and read some amazing books on our off time. At times it felt like I was spending more time alone which didn't seem to bother me at first till I started to realize that everyone seemed to have found a buddy and with the uneven amount of students on our time i felt like i had missed the boat. Of course this was a bit upsetting but I told myself to just move on and focus on God. The thing is, I was judging myself on what I was doing never thinking it was good enough which lead me to judging the ones on my team. I didn't realize this until my amazing leader Joanna saw what was going on.
The first month of outreach was very hard in the way of hiding away by myself and kind of feeling sorry for myself... not the right thing to do:) Christmas was good and hard all at the same time, I was starting to see that it wasn't me against the team and yes some people were closer then others but that doesn't mean that I'm a sucky person. We had the week off at Christmas but we did two Christmas shows where we were teaching and they were amazing, I think it was the first night when around 70 people came to know Christ!!
We moved back to the Capital Phnom Penh right after Christmas where the plan was we were going to start working at a aids orphanage right away. When we got there we found out that the people in charge of ministry thought it would be better if we waited till the new year to start which meant another week off! (might sound nice but we had already had lots of time off) This was really hard for me and I got very frustrated with waiting, not realizing what God was doing and that we as a team needed this time. The leaders were able to have long one on ones with everyone on the team with the time off and we were able to have meetings and really figure out what was going on and actually solve some of the problems. Also at this time God was starting to remind me of my desire of going to an SBS (school of biblical studies) that I had already been planning to attend in april in Hawaii, but it wasn't Hawaii that he was putting on my heart. Needless to say lots was going on in this time that we were all annoyed to have... oh God;)
My leader took me aside and when we were talking she challenged me to write down everything i believed about myself good and bad, the point to this was that as I told her what I was struggling with it was obvious that I was seeing all that I did as not good enough for God and that I needed to do more. I didn't understand this because i thought we were suppose to work hard at pleasing God but I didn't see that my heart was not working as a servant but to be accepted by God, so it was more like I was working for him on my own strength when we NEED to be walking with him on his strength. Anyways I didn't do what she asked me because I think I was scared of what I was going to have to deal with.
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