Team,You were all in my thoughts this past Wednesday as you gathered at New Life, and I hope you enjoyed the fellowship. Like many of you, I have been amazed at how the Lord has used our trip to help me grow in my relationship with Him, and I would like to share with you two ways He has used this trip in my life.
First, one of the areas where I have struggled in the past is sharing my faith with others – both with Christians who have become distant
from Him and with non-believers. But this trip has given me an opportunity to share with others how God worked through everyone on
the trip – both the people in our group and the families we served. I have been amazed at the conversations about my faith that I have been able to have with friends, family, and colleagues, including those that tried to discourage me from going on the trip in the first place. Sharing like this was something I could not easily do before the trip – what an amazing gift!
This Wednesday, while you were gathering at NorthRidge, I was working in California, and I attended an evening service at a church near my office. After the Praise & Worship team finished, the pastor called us together in prayer then asked us to do something I had never seen – to get into groups of 3-5 people and share our personal testimonies. What a great opportunity to practice my new gift!
I linked up with a young couple sitting next to me and shared my mission trip experience. They were both students, and they shared how God had helped them overcome some obstacles to getting an education. One of them had also prayed for a fulfilling internship, and the Lord provided him with a job at Ford this past summer. When I asked if he had gone to a local church, he responded that he had attended NorthRidge. I mentioned that I had attended there for several years and that the church had sponsored our trip, and I saw tears form in his eyes. He told me that NorthRidge was one of the greatest churches he had ever attended, that every single lesson touched his life, and that he regularly shipped the CDs home to his friends so that they could also be touched. His girlfriend nodded and confirmed that NorthRidge had been a changing influence in her life as well, although she had never visited in person. At this point, I became emotional as well – on a night when I was 2,000 miles away from NorthRidge, missing my home church and the new friends I had recently made, the Lord blessed me by connecting me with this brother in Christ and I was suddenly reconnected to the NorthRidge family.
Thus, the second way God used this trip is to show me that we truly are part of one Body of Christ that covers the world. We all
witnessed this in Mississippi as we shared in fellowship with Christians from around the country, but I saw it again when this
student, originally from Peru and currently studying in Los Angeles, instantly connected me to the family in Plymouth that brought me
closer to Christ.