Dancing in the Rain

We’re halfway home.  Time in Cambodia has flown by.  We’ve had some amazing experiences but as expected we’ve had our fair share of hard things too. Living in community with 12 people is hard enough but add heat, lack of food, and spiritual warfare to the mix and you’re bound to have a few bumps in the road.  Last week our girls found out that a few of them had lice so tensions were particularly high and people (including myself especially) were taking themselves a little to seriously. Wednesday was Kelby’s birthday, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for us.

Kelby is one of our constant sources of life and positivity and her birthday brought us just that, life and positivity.  We were able to have a team breakfast of homemade French toast which was a good time for us to all be together with “celebrate” as the only thing on the agenda.  And we were able to go out to dinner as well, which was another story.  Sandwiched in-between the two, during our afternoon prayer time, we decided to have an acapella worship session/time to pray for each other for the Holy Spirit to refresh us.  Being the extravagant God that He is, the Lord decided to bring a thunderstorm on Battambang in the middle of the hour and we all ran outside and danced and sang in the rain.

Amidst the chaos, (it was literally chaos… people running, jumping, dancing, screaming, and laying on the ground) I stopped running around and just lifted my hands to heaven and said thank you to our good Father who loves to give us good gifts.  As I stood there with my hands in the air I felt like God was saying directly to my heart “I’m so proud of you but you’ve been losing sight of why you’re here.  You’re not here to stress about how the team is spending money.  You’re not here to tell other people what they could do better.  You’re not here to “win souls.” You’re here to fall more in love with Me and to fall in love with My people and let me do the rest.  I’ve called you here because we’re friends and I just wanted to show you what I’m doing in Cambodia and let you be a part of it for a while.”

I almost started to cry as I started asking God to forgive me for getting hung up on pointless things and things that I can’t control and for forgetting to just love Him.  I believe that Tuesday was a turning point for our whole team and especially for me.  We have two different one-hour prayer/worship sets every day, Monday through Friday, and without any real worship leaders those times are like pulling teeth from time to time.  We have taken ourselves so seriously and been stressing about the quality of the worship and getting too focused on each other instead of keeping our eyes fixed on the Lord.  But since God revealed to us that what He is calling us to is just simple friendship and raw worship, everything has been different.  No one is looking around the prayer room in comparison.  People who like to dance, dance.  People who sit down and sing, sit down to sing.  There is freedom and it’s so beautiful.  And all it took to get us there was God showing up with rain for a birthday worship dance party. 

"The Chief goal of man is to glorify God and fully ENJOY him forever" -Westminster Catechism