Outreach!

The Lord has spoken! I know where I’m going for outreach! Let me tell you how it happened. It’s a long story, but it’s awesome! Yesterday morning the staff announced that we needed to meet in the afternoon (which we don’t normally do). Throughout the day everyone was wondering what the meeting would be about and most people guessed we would be talking about outreach. We hadn’t discussed much about outreach at all before this. We got there to meet at 4pm and they announced that we were going to start praying about outreach. Actually, we weren’t just going to start to pray about it, we needed to know who was going where by the next day!

I began to get really anxious because it all was happening so fast, and I hadn’t really been thinking about outreach very much up until this point. I have been learning and experiencing so much here that thinking about outreach was overload for my mind. But, after praying, the Lord quieted my mind and gave me His peace. As we were worshiping and praying, I opened my Bible to Lamentations 3:21-26 which says, “Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope; Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him. The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” Twice this passage says to “wait for the Lord.” I felt Him telling me to be patient and He would speak to me.

God really spoke to me throughout this whole process. During this week I had been struggling with hearing His voice. I was getting caught up in the pressure of hearing His voice, and my anxious thoughts were becoming so loud that I couldn’t hear Him. During this prayer time about outreach, God definitely spoke to me and I feel so excited about it!

So while we were praying, I kept thinking about France. I also got a picture of some children’s faces. I asked the Lord, “are these kids Asian?” I got excited because as most of you know, I really like Asian children :) I thought about Thailand. Thailand had been on my heart even before I left for my DTS. I opened my eyes then closed them again. They weren’t Asian. I asked, “Are they African?” They weren’t African. Then I knew, they were South American. At first I said, “Lord, I’ve been to South America and I speak Spanish. What if you send me there and I am the only one in the group who speaks Spanish? Then people would really be dependent on me and I don’t know if I want that kind of pressure on myself.” God reminded me of Moses and how he told God that he wasn’t eloquent in speaking and that he was slow of speech and tongue. God said to Moses, “I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.”

After praying, we shared with each other what God was saying. We took a break for dinner while the staff prayed and when we came back from dinner, they had selected the countries. They had all been praying about it too, so with what God had been speaking to them and what He was speaking to us that evening, they made their decisions. We came back from dinner with the 3 outreach locations written on the board: France and Germany/ Thailand/ Chile and Paraguay. They told us to then go off by ourselves and pray about where God was leading us. By that evening, we had to write down a location on a piece of paper with our name and drop it off at our school leader’s home. If we didn’t feel like we were hearing God speak clearly, we were to write that too. I was already blown away that all 3 of these locations had been placed upon my heart. The Lord really gave me confidence in Him from this because as I had mentioned, I was really struggling with hearing His voice and knowing what was from Him and what was just my own thoughts.

I went back to my room and began to pray. I wrote down the reasons why I wanted to go to Thailand: Asian children, working with women coming out of prostitution (First Baptist in Eugene sends a team each year to do this and I’ve always been interested), etc. I opened my Bible to Isaiah 55:8-9: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” A few minutes after reading this, the song “No Sacrifice” came on. The lyrics say, “To you I sacrifice these dreams that I hold on to. Your thoughts are higher than mine. Your words are deeper than mine. Your love is stronger than mine. This is no sacrifice, here’s my life.”

Hmmmm, I think God was trying to tell me something. I wanted to go to Thailand, but He kept nudging me toward South America. I felt such a peace. I felt God saying, “I know you want to go to Thailand, or some Asian country, and someday that will happen, but trust me now with this. You have gifts that I can use in South America.” I then remembered the passage He gave me earlier that evening from Lamentations that talked about waiting. He was telling me to wait on Thailand. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, my roommate In-Kyung pipes up from her spot on the top bunk of our room (we had both been praying quietly), “Darcy! Isaiah 55:8-13.” And that’s all she said. I looked it up and it was the passage that I had just read! And the lyrics to the song I had just listened to! My thoughts are not your thoughts! I read the whole passage and also found “You will go out in joy, and be led forth in peace” (vs. 12). God was saying, “Trust me on this. By choosing what I have for you, even if it’s not your #1 choice, you will be blessed. You will go out in joy and will be led forth in peace.”

So I wrote “Chile/Paraguay” on my paper and walked it over to our leader’s house. My roommate came with me with her piece of paper. We weren’t allowed to talk about what we had written down until after it was announced the next morning. This morning we all gathered in the classroom waiting anxiously for the decisions to be announced. It was so exciting! I felt such a peace. They came in and announced, and yes, I am going to Chile and Paraguay for my outreach!!!!! There are 12 of us going. They are:

Me

In-Kyung (ya, my roommate! We didn’t know we had both written down the same outreach location)

Stephanie

Mera (fellow Oregonian!)

Deborah

Shelby (who I flew to England with)

Carolina

Colin

Amir

Seth (fellow Oregonian!)

Camy

Rafa

It would be awesome for you to pray for us by name. I’m so excited for this adventure and for what God’s going to lead us to do! We know where we are going, but we don’t have any specifics about what we will be doing there.

Thanks for taking the time to read my story. God is so amazing and He wants to speak to us! We just have to be willing to be silent before Him and listen for His voice. He is such a loving God and He gives us free will to make decisions, but He definitely wants to have a part in them! And when we invite Him to be a part of them, we are blessed beyond measure.