Prayer

18 Octobre, 2008

Answers to prayer

One of the coolest things since arriving in Montpellier has been seeing how God has very specifically answered prayers. It has been both a powerful witness to confirming His calling for us to be here and to His continued faithfulness to provide for myself and my team.

Here are just a few of the ways that we have seen the Lord work:

That we are here, and that we arrived on time. Last year the team had to wait several weeks before coming because of needing to finish up on support, and so the very fact that we were able to leave on time and we didn’t have to change plane tickets or deal with the emotional stress of thinking that we would be leaving and then not being able to go right away was a huge blessing.

Housing. This was a huge prayer request once we arrived here. Over the summer I was blessed that the Skur family offered to let me stay at their place until I could find one for myself, which was fantastic that I didn’t have to spend all sorts of extra money paying for a hotel room for the first week and a half that we were here. Then, to have found a perfect apartment after being here for only 10 days was a huge blessing. The location and building I am living in now is such an envied place – we were very lucky to get it (well, not lucky…it was the place that the Lord had provided!).

Roommate. Once it became apparent last spring that there wasn’t going to be another guy STINTer here this year, we began praying furiously for someone for me to live with. My chief requests were that he be a believer and speak some English. Secondary were all sorts of other things like non-smoker, doesn’t hate the violin, etc. To be honest, by August I had basically given up on finding a roommate. The contacts that the girls from last year had looked into in their churches had fallen through, and all other avenues had seemed to dry up. Then Claire called me in the beginning of August (on my Dad’s birthday, actually) to let me know that someone had responded to a posting that she had put up for me on a French Christian housing website. It was the only response we had received all summer. And that’s how I got connected with Greg, my roommate who is a believer and wanted to live with someone who was a Christian and grow in his faith, who speaks English and really likes to, having studied English in London for 9 months this last year, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t really like to drink, is a student just moving to Montpellier and is just my age! It almost seemed too perfect to be true. It still does, though sometimes the cultural and living style differences are a little interesting…it’s working well though.

Man on the team. Since early this calendar year, so many people had been praying on my behalf that another man would be raised up to serve in Montpellier so that I wouldn’t be the only guy on the team. We went all spring and summer seeing no fruit in this area. It was hugely encouraging to me to have so many people praying for me in this specific area, but again, by the beginning of the summer I had basically resigned myself to being the only guy on the team. While it was at some point early in the summer that we found out that the Skurs would be joining us as an ICS family (long-term staff living and working abroad), it took until the middle of some staff meeting about two weeks into being here that I suddenly realized that I was totally not the only guy on the team, and that the Lord had brought another man on the team, it just wasn’t another STINTer. This revelation sort of bowled me over, and I was super excited that the Lord had definitely answered that prayer, it just took me a while to see it.



Our whole team here in Montpellier!


Community. One of my biggest fears before coming here was that once I got here I would feel very alone. With the rest of the STINT team living together and away from my normal social networks, I was very afraid that loneliness would quickly set in here. In Collobrières last weekend I really saw how completely untrue that was. It has been such a huge blessing that my team has bonded well together, and we are continuing to learn about each other and how to work well together. It has been a huge blessing that I haven’t felt lonely being away from home – not that I haven’t missed the people who I am not around right now, that’s totally natural, but the Lord has given me a great sense of feeling at home here with my team and in Montpellier.

Spiritual Climate. This past summer we had a group of 28 students and staff spend six weeks in Montpellier working with Agapé. They were here to meet students, develop relationships and share the gospel. Many of their friends they have put us in contact with so we would have some basis to start on in building relationships with people here. When they came back at the end of the summer, I was able to talk with several of them about their experience in Montpellier. One thing that many of them spoke of was the sense of depression that they felt here and the spiritual darkness that they saw in so many students. Historically people in France has been very unwilling to talk about God and typically when we would mention that we worked with a Christian organization and that we wanted to talk about spiritual things people would throw up very defensive walls. We, and many others, have been praying that God would start to change these things, and that people would be more and more willing to engage in dialogue about what they believe, and that we would be able to share more freely without people feeling like they need to be defensive. We really believe that we are just starting to see that happen. Since getting here in September, we haven’t felt as much this sense of depression in students and people here that we were expecting, and we’ve really seen more students willing to talk and share very freely about their beliefs and ours. We really hope that this is the beginning of a change in how people think about God here, and that we can continue to see more openness in this area!

Relationships with students. In France the most effective way to share the gospel is through established relationships. Also in France it is more difficult and often takes a lot more time to establish relationships. We have really been blessed with several relationships that have taken off very quickly, and even one group of students that have been intentional about inviting us to do things with them (which doesn’t happen very often – usually we to most of the initiating). This has definitely been a huge blessing to us as we continue to meet students and go out to share.

Agapé. Going into this year we had asked several students to be a part of a leadership team, hoping to develop students into being more invested in the ministry. At the end of the summer there were five students who had committed to being involved as a leader, but that quickly whittled down to just two as September got underway. We’ve been really praying for more leadership and involvement of students, so initially this was a little discouraging. However, as we’ve seen those two students really start to take ownership and be more integrally involved in helping to lead the ministry, we’ve been hugely encouraged. It’s our goal to work ourselves out of a job – to train the students here to be able to do everything and more than we can, that the ministry would be led by French students, not by Americans.

We’ve also been praying that the students who are involved with Agapé would be more aligned with the vision of Agapé nationally and that we would see a transformation from a “club” to a real movement this year. We presented our vision at our first meeting, and are taking the next three months to really unpack it practically, and so far we think that it is going well. We’re seeing students get more actively involved and we’re praying that that continues to grow!


Wow, well that’s just a few things that we’ve seen, but even that is a lot! Thanks for continuing to partner with me and my whole team in prayer!