11/4/23
For the past two weeks, I have been doing a phone fast to grow closer to the Lord. Today is when I felt like it was a right time in my heart to get back on my phone. Throughout this fast, I have truly truly been seeking the Lord more than I ever have before. I haven’t had more than a week where I would consistently be in my Bible every single day but eliminating the distraction of my phone has shown me that it is not always going to be a delight to read my Bible every single day, other days it is going to be a discipline and that is what I need in my life. I would like to apologize for not informing beforehand that I was going to be doing this and left all of my supporters in the dust, in the unknown. Thank you for your understanding.
This is officially the end of week 3 in Cambodia and I’m feeling good. I have loved getting to experience what the children are thinking and feeling in the village children’s ministry. Even though there is such a language barrier, you can still communicate so much non-verbally and it is just as meaningful. Even though you may not get to build a deep relationship with the children, you still get to build a deep connection and it is SO cool to be apart of that.
Something that I have found useful that my team, and all the teams in the rest of the squad for that matter, have done is feedback. We give each other encouragement, with the intention to be along the lines of “you look like Jesus when you…” and letting the other people in our team know how they are doing well. And if needed, we also give each other a Calling Higher feedback, where we can bring to our teammates attention how we may see them lacking in this area and we want to encourage you to grow in that to look more like Jesus. We have feedback sessions once or twice a week and the intention is to give an encouragement and Calling Higher once a week and then if needed, twice a week. But we still like to do encouragement on the “if needed” days ;).
What I wanted to say with feedback was that I feel like I have personally benefited from the feedback sessions and it has really encouraged me to grow as a person and in my relationship with the Lord. it may feel like sometimes they’re “calling me out” but I personally would rather someone to call me out and being blunt compared to beating around the bush. In the last feedback session that we had, there was two girls on my team who pointed out how they loved seeing how much I desired to grow deeper with the Lord and they both gave me the same verse, Matthew 7:7! It was just so amazing to see conformation in the Body of Christ and just see that it was the Lord confirming to me that He sees my efforts and He loves that I am desiring Him and wanting to seek how to desire Him, that genuinely filled my heart up so much I started tearing up.
Today we had a (almost) whole squad Adventure Day to Angkor Wat! It was SO SO cool, good, and refreshing to see everybody again and get to catch up on how they’re doing and get to experience the temples together! I did not realize how many different Buddhist/Hindu temples are around that make up what we actually know as Angkor Wat. We went to 4 different ones today, ending with the big Angkor Wat temple. Our intention was to watch the sunset from Angkor Wat and we did, but it wasn’t as much of a clear sky as we would have wished, but it was still an amazing and enlightening once-in-a-lifetime experience. I would definitely say that I am beginning to fall in love with the Khmer culture, I have always loved getting to know more and learning about the mannerisms in a culture and their reasonings behind why they do what they do, but I haven’t gotten to experience that with an Asian culture before and it has just been so cool.
