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Bulgaria
I went to Bulgaria this summer for a month. I've been on six mission trips before, but I've never had any trip that could even compare to this one. I went with a missions team from ORU, and we didn't do anything that I expected to do. I expected to go on a mission trip, do some dramas or something evangelistic, and get people saved. However, in their culture, anything strongly evangelistic is seen as part of the Occult. Instead, we served our contacts and the church in Bulgaria.
My team consisted of eight people. We went to different churches and preached. We probably did five services a week. When we weren't preaching, we were serving our contacts in any way possible. The American mindset is that if you're not busy doing something, then you're not being productive and you're not doing any good. Our contacts told us that we were more of a blessing just by being there than by anything we actually did. It was difficult to understand at first, but I now realize the truth of what they were saying.
It was amazing to see our family in Christ that lives in very different conditions from those to which we are accustomed. They were grateful for everything they had and they wanted to share everything and serve us with everything they had. This made a slight dilemma because we came there to serve them. We found that we could serve them by bringing God's Word to them in obedience to the commands of God. When we preached, it was by the grace of God. Every time that any of us tried to preach from our own words, it would flop. But every time we gave it to God, His power and His anointing would be on our words and people would get touched by what we were saying. It was hard for me to comprehend that God could use me to preach. I'm only 20 years old and I hate to speak in front of people. But God could use me to preach. The times when God used me the most were the “surprise” opportunities when I was the least prepared and I had to rely completely on Him. One time I went up to speak and didn't have a clue what I was going to say - not even a Scripture to encourage the people. But God moved. His words came out and I didn't even stumble over them. God's grace is sufficient. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. God wants us to give everything we have, and then when we finally run out of our own resources, all of His resources kick in and there is more than enough. God truly does more than we can even think or imagine.
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