Let your light shine!

Week seven: In weakness…  Another week of Intake done, and this week I was reminded that I can’t do this. I can’t do any of it. I came to the Lord in prayer and told Him, “I’m not capable, I’m not ready, I’m weak, I’m not strong enough to do this.”  When I think of all that missions entails and think about doing this I know without a doubt I can’t do this… This week we had a ‘Life in the Spirit’ Seminar. Within that we had different talks, a talk on God’s love, Sin and Salvation, New Life, Receiving the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and Growth. All of the talks were amazing, and if you ever have a chance to go to a Life in the Spirit Seminar I highly recommend you do. It’s a wonderful way to grow deeper in your relationship with the Lord and receive more of His Holy Spirit. During the ‘New Life’ talk the speaker gave us different bible verses we could reflect on, the one that I felt called to reflect on was Isaiah 65:1, “I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask fo...

Sixth week of Intake done! I remember a time when I never thought I'd have a blog and here I am writing a blog post weekly. As I've been doing this, before I write it out I come to the Lord and ask for His help in writing this and asking Him to guide me in whatever I should share each week. God's good and He helps us whenever we come to Him and He's definitely been helping me with this. This week was another week filled with great talks and projects, our two talks were on ‘Forming Intentional Disciples’ and ‘Interreligious Dialogue in Mission: “Conversations with Non-Christians.” Both wonderful talks and things to continue to grow in. We went treasure hunting again on Tuesday night and I was blessed to pray with more people during that. Something we’ve been doing is on Tuesday’s for lunch the single Intakers have lunch with one of the families that are a part of Intake. It’s a way that we can all get to know each other more and more. During my visit with the family ...

Week five: Do HARD things. Another week of Intake done! Each week I wonder what I’ll share with you all as I sit down to write out my update and I hope that I’m able to get something written out that makes sense and also shares something about this journey I’m on. So far, so good! There’s always just so many different things we go through each week, things that bless and challenge me in various ways. This week after the talks and workshops we did I kept thinking of this book I read when I was a teenager entitled “Do Hard Things.” It’s written specifically for teens and it talks about how we should strive to go out and do hard things. This week after hearing a talk on “preparing for missions” I was reminded that foreign missions (and specifically the first two years of missions) is HARD. And I totally knew that before joining FMC, but in the talk they went over a lot of good topics for us to reflect and go over before we go out on mission. One of the topics we went over was how goin...

Week four: God listens attentively  Another week has passed by, it’s crazy how fast time flies by! Before I know it I’ll be in the foreign country wherever I will be sent! God is good! This week we’ve been continuing to go through more church documents, Acts in the Bible, and we had talks on Discerning the will of God and Discernment of Spirits, we also had a workshop on the kerygma and sharing that in a different culture’s viewpoint. All of it is keeping us very very busy! Here are a few moments from this week that I wanted to share:  Treasure Hunting:  On Tuesday we went treasure hunting (where we take time in prayer and ask the Lord who he wants us to encounter and pray with, and then we go and search for those people.) and my team ended up at Walmart. We went out in teams of two, so me and my team member compared our lists of “words of knowledge” that we had gotten during prayer and started walking around Walmart. We came across a few different people, so...

Week three: You are CHOSEN I’m currently sitting in a room in the Big House waiting for the oven to preheat, and once it does I will be throwing in a frozen pizza to bake that I’ll be sharing with some other girls living in the house for our dinner. I spent time today writing out a blog post to put on here, but due to bad internet connection what I had written wasn't saved. And I now have to write out something else as upon that blog post being lost I decided it wasn’t really what I wanted to post anyway. (So bear with me in this post, hopefully this all makes sense.) This week we went over our testimonies in order to witness how Christ has been working in our lives with others, we also started going over various church documents. (Redemptoris Missio, Maximum Illud, Princeps Pastorum, Evangelii Nuntiandi, Apostolicam Actuositatem, and Ad Gentes), and we did treasure hunting ministry where we took time with the Lord in the chapel to find His treasure: someone who needed prayers...

Week two: Stretched. I've now finished week two of Intake! Time flies by fast! I was super tempted to simply keep out the difficulties of this week, but then that wouldn't be sharing exactly how this week was for me. So if I had to pick one word that would describe this week for me, it'd be stretched . Why? Because I definitely felt stretched this week. When reflecting on it, I thought of why you stretch before you exercise. You stretch so you don't strain or injure your muscles or joints, if you don't stretch you are more likely to injure yourself. And when it comes to stretching, you can encounter stretches you haven't done before, or haven't done in awhile and they are more difficult because your body isn't used to being stretched in that way, but it's definitely worth it at the end. And you continue to stretch, you don't simply do it once. You stretch before exercise, and after exercise and overtime it isn't difficult because you're...

It's only been a week. It's only been a week at Intake (also known as training) in Abbeville, Louisiana at Family Missions Company home base, and yet it feels like so much longer than that. This whole week I've been trying to figure out how best to explain all that has gone on this week, as there's just been so much going on in a short time. (It is a packed schedule so that we can receive an abundance of things before heading out to missions) I'll try my best to share this past week, but bear with me as this post may be a little bit everywhere.  How have I been? Overall I've been doing really well. The first two days or so I was a bit overwhelmed. Just adjusting to the new area and the community, and just continuing to let it sink in that I'm here and God has led me here. One of my prayers this week was just simply asking St. Therese of Lisieux to intercede for me as I join this community, as she herself experienced the many things that went on in a...