And We're Off!

The day's here! I'm heading to Alabama tomorrow (well I guess later this morning....) for about one week of orientation before our team heads overseas! The orientation will be really exciting because there will be over one hundred college students there, preparing to serve the Lord all over Asia for the summer! I will meet up with the six other college students on my team to prepare for the work that God has for us this summer.  We leave on June 7 (next Tuesday) to head to the Philippines and meet up with our missionaries for the summer! I am so excited to see what God does with the next two months. 

Here are a few prayer requests for our team:

- For God to prepare our hearts for the work that He has for us this summer

- For God to begin preparing the hearts of the Agta people that we will be ministering to this summer

- For God to bring unity to our team as we get to know each other and learn to work together

- For God to give us a greater love for Himself and a love for the people we will be ministering to this summer

- For wisdom and safety as we travel 

- For God to continually make us more like Himself this summer, so that we can love people like He does and make His name great all over the earth.

- Pray for God to be glorified every aspect of our team.  

Thanks so much for the prayers and support! I'll try to post more updates after our team gets to the field! 

Beautiful Feet

"How beautiful upon the mountains

are the feet of him who brings good news, 

who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness,

who says to Zion, 'Your God reigns.'

Break forth together into singing

you waste places of Jerusalem,

for the LORD has comforted his people,

he has redeemed Jerusalem.

The LORD has bared his holy arm

before the eye of all the nations,

and all the ends of the earth shall see 

the salvation of our God."

Isaiah 52:7, 9-10

In this chapter, Isaiah is prophesying about the coming salvation, in which God will show His sovereignty in saving his people from their sins.  Verse 7 is really exciting, because it shows God's desire to use people to declare His glory and proclaim His salvation to the ends of the earth.  God has an amazing plan to save His people from bondage and He wants to use us- how amazing is that? 

This verse has always really intrigued me.  God calls feet of those who take the gospel to the world beautiful.  Maybe this doesn't sound very "holy" or "spiritual" to say, but that just seems kind of weird to me.  If I take the gospel to those around me, then God calls my feet beautiful? Really?  I don't really get grossed out by feet like a lot of people do, but I've always thought that mine were pretty ugly- or at least not beautiful.  In high school I danced en point, so my feet usually had callouses, blisters, and bruised toenails.  They still get like that quite a bit when I go running.  I could go into more detail, but let's just say that I don't have the prettiest feet.  

But God has called me to use my life to proclaim the message of salvation among the nations.  This summer I have the wonderful opportunity to do that by spending two months taking the gospel to an unreached people group in the mountains of the Philippines. Literally, God is sending my "ugly" feet to go to the mountains and bring good news to those who have never heard! And so He calls my feet beautiful.  Why? Not because of me or anything I've done to make myself "beautiful."  But because my feet are fitted with a readiness that comes from the gospel of peace (Ephesians 6:15).  So God calls them beautiful because they are taking the wonderful message of salvation to a dying world.  And that is beautiful.  Even if my physical feet are ugly, God calls obedience prompted by a love for Him and a desire to take His message to the ends of the world, participating in His plan for the salvation of His people beautiful.  And I think it's pretty neat that He allows us to be a part of that.  

So this summer I'll be posting updates about what God is doing in and through our team while we're overseas.  It'll be quite an interesting summer, and I'm really excited to see what God does in those mountains with our feet.  May He use our time to work out His sovereign plan so that all the ends of the earth will truly see the salvation of our God!