Will You Represent What You Stand For?

This week entailed of hostal ministry. Yes, hostal with an a. not an e. this is Central America, people. And its been CRAZY. Sorry this blog will be a little long.
I’ll only write about day one, and day one will give you an idea about every other day this week and about how crazy God is.
So we wake up in our hostal, on real mattresses and without rats in our beds praise Jesus, and we each spend time alone asking the Lord for words and direction for the day. We each wrote down whatever words or images came to mind on a piece of paper and converged to share our words with each other. We had a lot of overlapping, seemingly crazy thoughts, and places in our minds, and with this fresh in our brains we headed out to face the city of Leon for the first time in intentional ministry.
2 of my girls had thought of the place in leon that does piercings, so we went there first. We walked around the store, praying and feeling suffocated by darkness. Leigha automatically got a headache upon entering the store. We left, and ended up standing across the street at two glass doors, words NayNay had gotten. We prayed, asking the Lord for direction and for Leigha’s headache, which immediately went away. Leigha had gotten a vision of an old woman with a basket on her head, and when I looked up from praying, I saw an old woman with a basket on her head standing next to a street vender near a blue chair the exact shade Kristina and I had both been thinking of. The lady with the basket literally disappeared into thin air, and so we talked to the vender. I had gotten the word bread, and Leigha had felt as though we were supposed to make something. The lady, Rosa, invited us to come learn to make street bread at her house and gave us her phone number. Crazy, huh?
Kristina had the color blue still on her mind, and surfing, and boats. We ended up at a surf shop called Pacific Reef, the outside that same color blue, filled with surfing, tiki things and boats. A verse NayNay had read that morning was hanging in a poster on the wall, and Cassie and NayNay had the words butterflies and heart necklaces on their list. Can you guess what was in the store? We ended up befriending a woman who works in the shop, who invited us to come to her church with her on Sunday and sing.
A few nights before, Cassie audibly heard the voice of the Lord say “its ok to get a tattoo� and she was like, ok God. If we find somewhere that’s Americanized, clean and not sketchy ill get one. We had each been praying about getting tattoos of words we’d had prophesied over us for awhile and asking the Lord if it was ok to honor Him with artwork and a permanent commitment on our bodies, so its ridiculous how this all works out. I had gotten the word Raven from the Lord that morning, and cassie had gotten tattoo and so had emma, and I had also gotten the lyrics to a For Today song that go “finally I surrender� which is what Emma wanted for a tattoo. We find a flyer hanging in our hostal for a professional tattoo shop, the sign was in English, the man who owns it has been tattooing for 20 years and owns two super high end shops in the UK as well. His shop is called Ravenskin. So we were like “crap this is going to be a million dollars because he’s so good� and stuff. So we prayed, and we were like “ok, God. If this is more than we can afford well know You’re telling us not to get these.� Cassie only had 70 dollars. So Leigha calls Andy, and he’s like “well actually id love to meet with you guys; ill come to your hostal at one.� So after our CRAZY morning of ministry, and then he came to the hostal to talk to us. Turns out, he used to own the hostal we were staying in, and that the man who painted the mural on the wall was the guy who did Leigha’s other tattoo in Managua two years ago. He draws up our tattoos and tells us the pricing : Cassies was literally 65 dollars. How crazy is that? And then he was like “I haven’t actually opened my new shop yet, but ill do your tattoos anyway.� And he did them all that night. And we had an AWESOME opportunity to witness to him; telling him about our lives, our trip, and what the significance of each of them was.
Every day has been like that. Waking up, and asking the Lord where to go and what to do. Trying to make every move in our daily lives intentional worship to honor His Name. Its been humbling, so good, so crazy, so radical. It’s a ridiculous way to live life; wandering to aimless places the Lord is taking you, praying for people on the street, buying random women bread and meals, going to a sad street venders house and sitting with her and having a crazy dance party, walking everywhere, getting 4 dollars for 3 meals a day, trusting that the Lord still speaks and that we have the ability to hear His Voice.
I truly believe the Lord is moving, and that the Lord speaks directly to me. Not only do I daily see His face, but I hear His voice as well. I believe in doing crazy, ridiculous thing, going completely out of my way and taking an excessive amount of awful public transportation to love one person and make their day, I believe in showering once every three days in cold water and wearing the same clothes four days in a row to live in a country where im completely out of place and cut off from everything that’s familiar to me so that I can change even just one persons life and be a part of something bigger than myself. I believe in love, and I believe in people, I believe that everyone’s story is important, and I believe in sacrifice. I believe there’s hope for humanity, I believe that my God is enough and that, through Him, my inadequacies are filled and I can change the world.