A few years back, as I was preparing myself to hug my boys and say goodbye for 2 weeks, one of the things that helped me to not fall apart in this moment was the kind words from a new friend, Emma, or as my children fondly call her – Fiji Emma. At this point we had met a couple of times but didn’t know each other well. We had no idea that by the end of those 2 weeks, God would have blessed us so abundantly with each other.
A friendship fueled by a desire to honour God and spread the knowledge of Him to all who know us, it’s her encouragement that really spurred me on, and continues to spur me on every time we meet. I was the only mum on our team, leaving small children behind. Fiji Emma’s words of encouragement were twofold. Firstly, that her mum had done a similar thing when she was little and it didn’t have long term negative effects on her, it served as an encouragement to her when she grew up. What a relief! And secondly, that God had a purpose for me, in this moment in my life. That everything leading up to this was to prepare me for whatever lies ahead in these next two weeks.
And oh, what an adventure lay ahead!
Over 3 years, God had blessed me with some beautiful friends, both Australian and Fijian, He was faithful beyond belief and shocked me daily as we saw Him answer prayer after prayer after prayer. I have never sensed His presence so closely before and His hand working in every situation, despite so many of them being out of our comfort zones.
Over a good cuppa a few weeks ago, Emma and I reflected on some of the ways we saw God working in Fiji. What I absolutely love is that when I asked her out of all the things we saw God do, across 3 trips to Fiji, what was the one that stands out to her the most? To our surprise, we both had the same answer…
Fiji – July 2017 – we had spent 2 days in a Fijian village and made some really special friends. After returning to our hotel in Suva, we had been lamenting that although we had an incredible time with our new friends, we didn’t once open our Bible. We didn’t really hear about their faith and we didn’t get to share ours with them. It felt more like a cultural experience. It actually brought me to tears. We had flown all this way to see what their faith in the Lord looked like and to share fellowship with them and worship with them, and despite experiencing their beautiful hospitality, we hadn’t done any of that. As I was journalling and crying and praying and chatting with Emma, we were praying for a second chance. A chance to see them again and to be able to open God’s Word together and share in what we knew we all believed.
At that moment I just couldn’t see it would be possible. We would see them again, to watch the State of Origin, but that wasn’t the place and outside of that there wouldn’t be a chance. While pleading with God for another opportunity, little did we know that he was already working in the background.
Emma and I finished praying and chatting and wandered out to the courtyard for dinner. Imagine our surprise when we looked up on the balcony and saw a bunch of our Fijian friends there waiting for us! Without us knowing, they’d found out where we were staying and spent an hour on the bus to get to us. It might seem like a small deal, but it was in that moment and so many others like it that God truly solidified my faith in Him.
For the next few hours we worshipped, prayed, poured over the Scriptures, studied together, cried together, comforted and encouraged each other. It was like a picture of heaven, and a night I will never forget.
That trip in particular taught me something so real about prayer and words from Tripp’s devotional, New Morning Mercies
“Prayer is abandoning your place in the centre of your world and daily surrendering that place as an act of heartfelt worship.”
Matthew 7:7 says that if you “ask, it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.” The intention of these words “ASK, SEEK, KNOCK is not in the singular. It’s a call to keep on asking, to keep on seeking, to keep on knocking. To be continuously so concerned with God’s thoughts on your life and less on your own.
I am so grateful for God’s kind invitation to be involved in His plan for His world. We may only play a tiny part in it, but we worship a powerful and complete God who works through weak, incomplete humans to fulfill His purposes.
I can’t wait to share a new ministry opportunity with you all in the next few weeks, which will be an invitation to take heart, to be encouraged and to share together in how we can be more involved in God’s great invitation. So watch this space…
