Jesus Loves Me This I Know!

So this week was AMAZING because God is faithful and never changes. He truly is the lover of my soul. Tonight we just completed our last week of conferences for 2009. Well this week God showed Himself strong and surprised me in the process and caused me to be overwhelmed. I was really missing my family this week. Which is unusual for me because I'm pretty used to being away and am content with where God has me. Well I was having an extremely hard time with not being able to see my family for Christmas. I asked my team to pray for me because I knew I was going to Wisconsin because I had no money to go home. My plan was to look forward to trying to go to Hawaii in the summer if I had the money. Well my team prayed for me.

I was able to keep focus during our services but every once in a while during the day it would just hit me how much I missed my dad and sisters. Well as much as I put my focus on God and asked Him to give me the grace to get through this I was still really struggling. My heart felt like it couldn't be calmed as much as I wanted it to. Well...God had a reason for that. On Wednesday when we were packing up all our stuff our team Revivalist sat us down for a meeting. He wanted to read some testimonies from people at the church. He read how God had changed them in the course of 4 days. Then He thanked us for our giving. We wanted to help the widows in the church financially and we raised hundreds of dollars within our team. He said that as a "dad" he was proud of us. He said not only had we been giving to the body of Christ at the church we were ministering at but were giving to each other. Then Ryan said Shawntay, I want to let you know that your team wants to send you home for Christmas. My eyes welled up with tears of joy. Now I saw why God wouldn't let my missing my family go away. And God let me see how much my team loves me.

So I'll be going home to Hawaii a few days after our team's missions trip to El Salvador. I'll be going to Wisconsin to touch base with friends there and then I'll head home for a few weeks. I'll go back to Wisconsin and then head to Michigan at the beginning of January. I'm stoked to see what God has in store for me. He has been refining me and changing me to be more like Him. I'm learning what it is like to live a Christian life with freedom and joy and not in bondage of this flesh.

I love God and I'm glad He is the lover of my soul. I love talking to Him in prayer. Its better than any conversation on the cellphone.

One BIG thing God is teaching me is: to be who God wants me to be.