New lessons from God

Hi guys, Victor here giving another update on our trip in Penang :)

Just wanted to share something God has been teaching me and the team. The first week we were all about focusing on training to be effective during seminar nights. The second week in Penang, we started to get comfortable and more confident in our stride of teaching and running the Children Institute. We thought we had everything figured out and that the rest of the trip would be smooth sailing all the way! Then God convicted me of the dangers of ROUTINE. We were getting so caught up in our CI performances, Day trips, fun and activities, that we almost forgot about the condition of our hearts. Busyness fills up our time, which may even sometimes take away the important 'alone time' that we need with God. We may be on a mission trip, but even doing God's work without retreating from the realities of the world could cause us to run aimlessly and destroy all the good work we had intended to do. God convicted me of my sin and error of TRYING to run a good show and a fun trip for the teachers instead of LEADING hearts to CHRIST on this trip. If anything causes us to take our eyes off the cross, (even the excuse of missions) then we are failing! We are becoming ensnared in the dangerous trap of running a DEAD ROUTINE!!! Even back home, my ministries could become a distraction from special time needed to check my heart with God! We get so caught up with running through the motions, just going with the flow and at the end of our " successful " trip we feel TOTALLY empty and worn out!!! Then we ask ourselves, " what was that all about??"

We initially had scheduled a scavenger hunt yesterday, but God lead us to cancel it and have every individual check their hearts, motives and desires on the trip asking God for any blind spots that we may have and for Grace to help us to repent and change. It is my fault and responsibility as a leader if we had continued living the trip the way we did! We even dropped our strong routine momentum of teaching the CI curriculum and changed it to emphasizing on teaching AGAPE love to the kids. This weeks kids couldn't understand much English, neither did they have the opportunity to learn 'complicated' words such as responsibility, design, ownership, etc. The curriculum was excellent, but too full of different colors of God's nature for the kids to understand. We didn't want to go with the flow, run the show, teach the curriculum and have the kids totally forget everything they learned in the seminar while went home sharing pictures and stories of what we did with the kids. We decided to focus on the white light instead of the seven colors. We decided to teach the DEEP power of God's Agape love and if all else fails with them forgetting responsibility, design, ownership, suffering, contentment etc, they will never forget the ONE thing we taught them. LOVE NEVER FAILS. We also changed some of the stories tailored for christian kids to stories of salvation and God's powerful amazing love for all of us. Watching the skits help them visualize God's Love as kids learn by visualization.

God totally changed the way we did skits, from trying to make them the funniest most successful skits, to RE-LIVING past legend's experiences and tough choices.
Fun is not a bad thing, but it should not be our focus! Fun will follow behind our mission! We were almost heading down the trip as FUN being our entire MISSION FOR THE ENTIRE TRIP!!!!! I truly thank God for revealing our faults and errors to me, saving my life and the team member's as well from living a dangerous dead routine of fun in the name of missions! God is SOOOO Good and He is taking our second week to a new HIGHER level of experiencing Him and his deep ways! We are growing more in Christ like maturity and are starting to see things through the eyes of God and not our own! Praise our mighty God, ALL the Glory belongs to Him :)

vick

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