Praying Expectantly, Praising Intentionally

This is a story that has been a little while in the making, so some of you have probably already heard bits and pieces of it, but I wanted to put it all together into one post, so here goes.

As most of you know, in the weeks leading up to leaving for this internship I was spending a majority of my time camped out in the UW hospital nuero ICU with my family because my older cousin Brooks had a major brain aneurysm on May 8th. During that time my family spent a ton of time just hanging out and wasting time. We played games, did puzzles, decorated Brooks' room with pictures from coloring books and Bible verses and ate a lot of food from friends who love us, but in and among those moments of just chillin, we also did a lot of praying. Every time the doctors brought in a new update or Brooks levels began to move for the good or bad, we entered God's presence in prayer. A great thing happened to me during that time, the beginning of this story, in those moments of prayer I found myself expecting to see results from the big prayers we were praying. I found myself overjoyed, but not super surprised when Brooks' recovery moved forward in leaps and bounds, when his body defied the odds and we saw miracles happening. God was answering big prayers and it was sweet!

One thing I realized as a result of that time though,was that I hadn't really been praying that way for a long time. I started looking back a little bit on journal entries and thinking about how I had been treating prayer, and I saw that even though I believed God heard and answered prayers, I wasn't living like I expected Him to answer my prayers. I would spend time in in prayer, lift up my cares to the Lord, then move on with my day at the status quo, forgetting what I had laid before God. I wasn't living and looking for answers, I wasn't even opening my mind to the possibility that the things happening in my everyday life were a result of the prayers I had been praying. So, as I left for my internship I decided that I was going to pursue praying expectantly, paying attention to what I was taking to God and looking for results in my life every day.

If the first big step in this story was when I started praying with my family for Brooks, the next big step happened in Ghana on the second Wednesday night while I was praying with Becca. That day had been kinda rough for our team and when it came time to settle down in our room for the night Becca and I felt a huge burden for our team. We could see some things happening with project stuff and in relationships that could ruin our team. We knew that these things would be hard to combat with conversations, but knew that God could move hearts way better than we could try to woo them. So, we prayed for our team. Prayed for our team leaders, for details, for whatever God brought to us and the next day prayer was answered in a way we never would have imagined. If I could have hand-picked an answer it probably would have consisted of some well placed conversations, a couple apologies, and smooth sailing for details the rest of our trip, instead God broke the hearts of our team with the state of the children's home through a crazy (read "likely possessed man") wandering dangerously close to the children's home while our team was there. Our team came back to the hotel from the home and was overwhelmed by the reality of the threats Satan holds on the home. We prayed powerfully in the most Spirit led prayer I've ever experienced. We prayed the strongholds of Satan on our project would be broken, and from those moments on, there was a visible difference in the unity of our team. That night when Becca and I got ready for bed again both of us came to the other with the same thought, we had seen God's answer to our pleading for unity in His call to prayer. There was nothing left to do but praise the Lord for His faithfulness and swift answer to prayer.

As I thought about this experience in view of the burden I felt to pray expectantly, I began to see that just as important to me should be praising intentionally. I began to see that when I start praying expecting to see prayer answered and praise God when I see answers, big or small, God becomes so much bigger. His attention to detail and ability to work pieces of life that overwhelm me starts to astound me as I take notice of the things He is working in my life. And then, this BIG HUGE God also becomes personal.

Over the course of this summer there have been many ways God has been refining these thoughts and this idea of praying expectantly and praising intentionally, definitely too many to put in one blog. But hopefully in just sharing the big picture here, more conversations an opportunities to share more happen later.

Photo Bomb

So I realized while I was writing my most recent update letter (which will hopefully be published tomorrow morning) that I didn't really post too many pictures from Ghana. So, I wanted to take a post and devote it entirely to some Ghana pictures, hope you enjoy!

Children's Home

This is the existing Good Shepherd Happy Children's Home.

Nick, Becca, and me reading the Jesus Storybook Bible with the kids

Becca teaching how to read clocks at the children's home

Momma Tammy helping with teaching clocks

Baby Time

The children's home is currently taking care of 3 infants along with the older children.  While we were there, they barely had time to lay down, everyone fought for their baby time :)

Moses

Agogo

 

Princess

Life at the Hotel Liberte

Jonathan crunching numbers and Josh in the background , he's been working way too long....

John and me working on the survey

The team working on the model the night before the ground breaking celebration

A little 7-up action at the end of the night is always a good idea

 The New Site Celebration

Godsway was probably my favorite little guy at the home! so cute right?! 

Our whole team :)

The Canopy Walk

Nick was really excited to be walking high above the jungle.

Amazing right?!

The Moral of the Story

Although posts for the rest of the summer, and even beyond hopefully, will definitely be influenced by my time in Ghana, I wanted to put together one post that really sums up a couple of the big lessons I learned/God-moments I saw while we were on our trip.  That being said, I feel like this post is going to be inevitably unorganized.  I'm gonna ask you to bear with me and be understanding.  Hopefully any foggy areas will be cleared up in later posts, I've got a couple more specific ones already brewing and I don't want them to be too redundant so I'll probably leave some questions.  For now, I just want to scratch the surface of the "big things" from my time in Africa.  As always, feel free to comment with questions or whatever.  I really do check comments and if you post looking for a response, I'll definitely try to respond well :)


Before we left for Ghana, my prayer was that God would continue to reveal to me and challenge me to step out in faith in the area of trusting Him to do big things.  In the weeks leading up to our trip God revealed to me that there have been a lot of times recently, really in the past year and a halfish (AKA since Haiti), that I have simply been hesitant to believe in the magnitude of God.  This isn't to say that for the last year and a half God hasn't done some great stuff in my life and brought about a lot of growth since Haiti , but if there is one struggle that has reoccurred in my life, it is this tension with trusting in God to be faithful and to do big things past the status quo.

There are so many ways that God answered m prayer to see His "Bigness" throughout the trip.  Honestly, I feel like everything that God revealed to me throughout the trip tied back to this prayer, that in itself is a revelation of God's faithfulness and bigness to me!

--Answered Prayer-I've got a more specific post in the works about this but big picture lesson I guess is that as we saw Gad answer prayers over the course of our trip I began to pray more and more expectantly.  In Ghana, we saw God breaking down barriers, moving hearts, and just working stuff out in ways that we could never imagine, and I'm excited to share more about this next post.

--Heart Change-Although God did move a lot in my heart in Ghana, the heart change that happened in George's life was one of the most beautiful things I've ever witnessed.  If you remember from one of my last posts, George is the electrical engineer from Ghana who worked with our team.  This was the second EMI trip he had done, but the first one that he had actually done in Ghana.  He is from Accra originally, and even though Aflao is only a couple hours away, he had never really spent time in or near Aflao.  Over the course of the trip George made it clear that before this trip he really had no idea that conditions like those in Aflao existed so close to his house.  Seeing the way George was moved with compassion during the week was so sweet, but I had no idea about how much God was really moving in his heart until he shared his testimony with us the last night we were in Accra.

When it came time for George to share how God had moved in his life during the trip, he told us that before he came to Aflao not only was he unaware of the conditions there, but that to him Aflao was the bad the part of the country.  Before he thought of a place that needed to see the love of Christ, he thought of unemployed people who practiced vodoo and gave Ghana a bad name.  When he shared with us, he told us that it had never crossed his mind that he would find kids like his own and men and women who loved the Lord when he got to Aflao.  Honestly I feel like I'm butchering this story I know I can't do it justice, but when George told us how God had moved his heart to love the children at the orphanage and see the people of Aflao as brothers and sisters, I've never seen someone so changed by the Gospel!

--Confirmation-When I was preparing to intern with EMI this summer one thing that I had to do was fill out my top three choices for the project trip I wanted to go on.  I looked through the different trip options, I knew I wanted to go to Africa and there just happened to be three tips to Africa.  As I looked through the needs of the trips and learned about the ministries that EMI was partnering with, I was drawn to the trips in Gabon and Uganda and to be honest, the trip in Ghana was my last choice.  I sat and waited for an email for a couple weeks, then I was honestly a little disappointed when I was assigned to Ghana.  The disappointment didn't last long, I really didn't have a ton to base my preferences on, but you know I got my last pick, I have to say I was bummed.

At some point during our trip, I was sitting in our hotel hanging out with everybody, working or playing seven up, pr maybe doing a little of both, I realized that if I had gotten any other trip assignment I wouldn't have been right there at that moment.  From surveying the new land, to spending time with the kid's at the orphanage, to seeing the work that God has done in Chris and Tammy's lives, to the relationships that God blessed me with on the team, God confirmed over and over again that I was on exactly the right trip.  I never would have chosen the trip I was on, but God did and I praise Him for it!

So yeah here are some sweet things God did in my life in Ghana, can't wait to share more with you as God puts them on my heart!

Hanging Out on the Coast

So after the rest of our team left, Becca, Nick, and I tagged along with John as he met with future ministry partners in the Accra area and did a little chillin too.  On Monday during the day we spent some time with George and his family.  I can't remember if I've mentioned George or not, but he was the electrical engineer on our team.  He's from Ghana and it was so cool to have him on our team, serving in his own country.

Quick side note about George: When I had heard that we were going to have a Ghanaian on our team, I really didn't know what to expect.  A big focus of our orientation week was how to prepare for cultural differences on our project trip.  We talked about how different and difficult it might be to work with nationals, so as I prepared to work with George I tried to be ready for anything.  When we met George and started working with him I was so pleasantly surprised.  First off, he's just a really great guy!  He and his wife Joyce were both great, so fun and a real picture of Ghanaian hospitality, so good to us the whole time we were there!  Also though, during the project it was great to have George's insight and expertise on the trip.  He was able to foresee problems we never would have thought of and was able to work with local officials comfortably in a way we never would have been able to as foreigners.  Also, I've got a pretty sweet story about George's experience with heart change on our team over the week, look for that in the next post!

Anyway, during the day Monday our group split up for a little while-Nick and John went to see the construction of George's new house and test his water there while Becca and I hung out at a school that George's mother-in-law headmasters.  After we hung out with Joyce's mom and enjoyed some fried plantain and peanuts (so good!) we visited a class of kids for a little while and sang with them.  Becca was in her element as I tagged along and was honestly a little overwhelmed by so many kids, but she handled it like a champ.  After we met back up with the guys we headed back into Accra for the evening for an info session for area engineers and architects to hear more about how they could get involved with EMI.  George had set this up for us before we got to Ghana and we had announced in on the radio the first day we were in Ghana and again Monday morning.  The session went so well!  We were a little nervous about how much interest there was going to be, but by the end of the night we realized there was no reason to be nervous.  The room that was reserved for the event was full and while we mingled with everyone after John gave a quick overview of EMI and answered all the questions people had, everyone we talked to seemed really excited about the potential to volunteer on upcoming projects like George did with us! (Up to date update: John has gotten so many call and emails from people who were at this meeting since we've gotten back!  He said he will definitely have a couple of them on his next team this fall and many more in future projects.)

Tuesday morning we went with John to some meetings for his next project.  A couple of the meetings were just outside Accra and then the other one was a while up the coast at a children's home.  The home was very similar to what we designed for the Jesse Brooks Foundation, except on a much larger scale.  It was really encouraging to see a children's home like the one Chris and Tammy envisioned for their own ministry done well, I hope that next time they come back to Ghana they can visit it.

After we walked around that children's home site, our work was officially done!  Because the children's home that we had driven to was already pretty far up the coast, we decided not to go back to Accra for the night, but instead we drove a little longer to spend the evening in Cape Coast to relax for our last night in Ghana. 

The next day (Wednesday) we planned to just sight see a little near Cape Coast and then head back to Accra to fly out that night.  To start the day off we went to Elmina, just a couple minutes from Cape Coast, to visit St. George's Castle.  The castle was built in 1482 and is the oldest European structure in Sub-Saharan Africa-sweet.  The castle was also built as a trading post and used for most of its life as one of Africa's primary slave trading posts, not sweet, actually pretty heavy.  I'm honestly a little unsure of what to say about this, it really was an amazing experience, but amazing in so many ways, very few of them being fun.  The way the slaves were treated, the quarters they were forced into, and the conditions of torture and rape they dealt with daily were unimaginable.  The whole time that Nick, Becca, and I were being led on a tour of the castle with a guide who worked there, I just kept thinking, "how does this guy give this tour every day?" Seriously, could you imagine being a Ghanaian, knowing that years ago if you lived in the same place you would be living in fear of foreign invaders who threaten every day to capture you and hold you as a prisoner in the worst conditions possible, before they ship you off on a crowded ship around the world, to a destination you may or may not live to see, to be traded like an animal as a slave to someone who is superior to you simply because of where they were born?  But, really, the hardest part of this experience for me was the fact that the Christian church had so readily married itself to the practice.  The Portuguese Church sat right in the middle of the castle's courtyard and doubled as the slave presentation/bargaining area, while the Dutch church was nestled conveniently above the female slaves' dungeons, and the missionaries' quarters were spread all over the second floor.  I know the Church exists in a fallen world and as humans we mess up a lot, but how did fathers get this so wrong?  I really am thankful for this experience, as challenging as it was, I know that in some small way it shaped me and I'm going to continue to process and learn from it.

Happily, our second destination of the day was a little less intense and a lot more fun.  We went to a canopy walk at Kakum National Park.  The canopy walk is a series of 7 rope bridges suspended between 8 trees, overlooking sweet jungle reserve!  As you walk almost a quarter of a mile you are at times 40 meters (about 130 ft) above the ground.  You can see tops over huge trees and walk between amazing Baobab trees!  Sometimes you can see moneys (sadly we didn't), but it was soo cool anyway!

Becca, Nick and me chillin on one of the stops between bridges!

Becca having fun on one of the bridges :)

After we finished the canopy walk we made our way back to Accra where George and Joyce saw us off at the airport.  We made our way back to the States pretty uneventfully and worked on getting caught up on sleep and re-entering America without hitting too hard of a wall.  Overall a great few weeks in Ghana with some awesome people!  Be looking out for on more Ghana post with some deeper thoughts and lessons, then hopefully one Colorado catch-up post and then I'll be blogging real time again-YAY!  Please feel free to post questions or comments!  I love hearing from people who are reading :)

Also, because I can, while we were in the Atlanta airport waiting for our flight to Denver, I met Richard Blais!  I know that means nothing to probably 90% of people reading, but he is my favorite, and realisitcally the best, chef to ever be on Top Chef (my favorite show!) and he won last season's "Top Chef: All-Stars" it was fun and I got a picture with him (huge shout-out to Miss Becca Agee for indulging me and taking this pic), so I'm sharing shamelessly :)

The End of the Beginning

So my last post update pretty much ended at the evening of Wednesday the 8th.  After that, time in Ghana was spent on three things-the final presentation of our work to the ministry, closing time with our team, and then time in Accra with John, Nick, and Becca after the rest of our team left.  Without boring you with too many details, I'm going to try to recap all of these a little bit.  Part of me feels kind of silly going back and writing about all this stuff since so much time has already past, but at the same time, I'm so thankful to have so many people walking with me this summer, supporting me with prayers and love and I want to be able to share this experience, so I hope you enjoy!  Also, if you want to hear a little different perspective from the trip, here is a link to Becca's blog too!  I loved getting to know this girl over the last couple weeks and I think she's pretty great :) Plus, she's a teacher, so she's definitely a little better with words than me!

Anyway, the end of last week was all about wrapping up the details of the beginning of our project trip well so that when we left we would leave the Jesse Brooks Foundation with a great vision for the future and that we would leave in such a way that set our team up to go home and finish the project well.  Thursday was definitely crunch tome for everyone, but especially the architects.  Their portion of the project is really what captures the dream of the ministry and casts a vision for the potential of the project as they lay out the master plan for the land, so by Thursday evening everyone joined the architects' team :) Before we left the States, Bob, one of our project leaders, told us that he thought that the best way to communicate the architects vision for the master plan would be to make a scale model of the site.  To be honest, I was pretty skeptical of this idea when I heard it, the only experience I have with architect models is the movie One Fine Day, and if you've seen that movie, you know might be able to imagine why the idea didn't really seem practical (for those of you missing the allusion, Michelle Pfieffer's character drops a model and it breaks all over).  But luckily, I was not the one calling the shots and Bob's experience paid off! But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

Before we presented the model, we obviously had to build it, which took most of Thursday afternoon and a majority of the night as well.  I forgot to mention also that we were trying to do this as a surprise for Chris and Tammy, they had no idea we were building the model, which was a little bit of an adventure trying to figure out how to work without them seeing us :) Building the model with the whole group was a lot of fun.  Like I said, I had never done that before and the concept is even a little foreign to me, but it was so cool.  As we cut chipboard and glued little houses together and placed everything on the site as close to perfect as we could, the project really started to become a reality for me.  Also, staying up til 2:30 with our group, trying to stay sane while working together efficiently and having a little fun at the same time was pretty amusing!  Becca had been sipping iced coffee all night and was wired, which was great, and so many fun stories kept the evening interesting!  Here's a picture of the finished product:

The next morning we were up early again to get ready to present the model and the master plan.  On most EMI trips this presentation is a lot like a business meeting, the ministry leaders sit down with the team and get to see what the team came up with and see the plan for continuing work back in the states, but our presentation was more of a celebration with the community.  We had the ground breaking (or "sod-cutting" in Ghana) ceremony on the new land.  All the kids from the children's home came and so did lots of community leaders and even the king came!  It was definitely an interesting new cultural experience.  First off, we were starting on Africa time for sure, 10:00 was the start time on the invite and by 11:30 everyone was finally sitting down to start the ceremony and then the king rolled in around 1ish as one of the community officials was speaking. He definitely stole the show with his entrance.  But aside from that stuff, it was cool to see a celebration with the community and just get to participate in the blessing of the land and see the excitement of everyone involved.  Also, most of us were sporting sweet Ghanaian outfits that we had Pastor Osmund make for us earlier in the week!

The best part of the day was definitely when we presented a board with the drawing and renderings of the new site and buildings to the kids and then presented the model to Chris and Tammy.  The emotion and excitement from both of those things truly captured what God has been working in the hearts of everyone involved in this project! 

One thing that seemed to hit most of our team during the sod-cutting ceremony was seeing the kids on the land as we presented to them the foundation of plans for what can be their new home so soon!  I don't think that I've really shared with you what the home the kids are living in now is like. Obviously we're putting together plans for them to relocate, but the situation is much more than just needing more space.  The current home is located on the outskirts of Aflao, it's surrounded on either side by a swamp which causes flooding during the rainy season and as you drive up to the home you have to go through the town landfill and a cemetery that's in pretty rough shape itself.  Every time we drove up to the home we would see people digging through the landfill and wild pigs and goats running around snacking on trash.  For me, that experience really made it clear to me that as we served the children at the home, we were walking alongside "the least of these."  Getting to see the contrast between that and the hope on the new land was pretty awesome, just another continuation of this new life story God is crafting with this project :)

This is a picture from the road leading up to the children's home taken probably 100 ft from it's entrance.

Once the ceremony ended, like 3:30 (long for us Americans to be sitting, but no time at all for an African celebration) we went back to the hotel, napped for a little while, and then spent the evening debriefing, basically just sharing with everyone what God did in our hearts over the week.  It was amazing again to see how God had worked just a little differently in everyone's hearts throughout the trip.  We all had completely unique experiences and feelings that God crafted perfectly for everyone.  Sitting back, I could hardly believe that I had only known everyone in the circle for just over a week!  The next day it was back to Accra for one last night of debriefing at a hotel on the beach and then the next day our teammates made their way to the airport to head back home.  Like I said before, Nick, John, Becca, and I stayed for a few more days, I'll recap those in the next post.

Home Again, Home Again

Nick, Becca, John, and I made it back to Cololrado safe and sounds this afternoon.  I was hoping to take the afternoon/evening to blog updates from the week, but I ended up hanging out with the interns, grabbing our first dinner together since our second day of orientation, May 24th.  I'm starting to hit a wall and need to grab some sleep.  But I promise PROMISE to blog tomorrow afternoon!  There have been so many amazing experiences that I haven't had the chance to share, I can't wait to fill you all in!

Call Me Boss

We’ve gotten so much work done on the project since Sunday night!  Bob and I were just working on entering the survey data into CAD and now we’ve got the basically the whole Topo map of the site finished.  There are still some small details to take care of back in the states, but hopefully I’m done with it for this week! 

The architects have been working so hard on the master plan and are making great progress!  There are still a bunch of details like drawing up the final sketches for our presentation and adding color to them and stuff, which hopefully we will all be able to help them with.  The plan that they have out together looks great!  They’ve really been able to look at all the needs and the dreams for the future of the children’s home and plan well. The plan includes two phases, the first being the actual children’s home which is actually multiple home units so that the kids are all in smaller “family” settings with adults and siblings in each units, boys and girls restroom units, a utility/kitchen area, and a multipurpose building (really just a roof and open sides like they have at the existing home) that will be used for a school and church gatherings.  The second phase is a bigger school meant to serve the whole community, a real church building, and an admin building to serve to the whole site.   To be honest, before this trip I didn’t realize there was so much that architects did outside of making stuff look nice (yes I am a typical civil engineer…) but it’s been cool to work alongside them and get to see another discipline close up.

The rest of our civil team has gotten all the water test done.  We found the both the wells that a couple families who live near the land are drawing out of are really clean, which is great! Both the wells are open so we were worried that there would probably be bacteria or E-coli growing in them, but they are both clean!  That’s really encouraging because we know then that the well that the children’s home will dig isn’t tapping into contaminated groundwater! It does look like designing some parts of the water system could get tough because there is a lot of clay on the site, but hopefully when we get back to the states, Josh and the team can figure out a good design for the soil type.

It’s been really sweet to get to see the hearts of Chris and Tammy Brooks as we work alongside them to plan this children’s home site.  God has been using the image of bringing life from death so much this week as we talk with them.  They started this foundation nine years ago when their daughter, Jesse, was killed on her first missions trip in a car wreck and they are so legit! They’ve allowed God to use them to bring life to so many kids instead of being swallowed up by the sorrow that comes with death on this earth. A really clear picture of this for me was yesterday when we took some time off of working to go to the children’s home and hang out.  We had been over there Sunday to just play with them so yesterday we wanted to do something for them, so we decided to take some songs to sing with them and brought Becca’s children’s Bible with us again.  Becca, Nick, and I taught the kids a combination of camp songs and worship songs with lots of motions and the kids even sang some songs to us, which was cool!  For those of you requiring proof that I actually was allowed to lead singing-video is coming when we get back to the states :) After we sang for a while we read them a story from Becca’s Bible and had some fruit roll-ups with them, it was a blast! 

But, the really reason for this tangent, was to say that this was the first opportunity I had to see all the kids from the home gathered together at the same time.  Whenever we’ve been there before everyone has been kind of all over doing their own thing.  While we were all together singing I realized for myself what I had heard before, that most of the kids in the home are over 12.  Really there are only a few little guys running around.  Living in reality, most of the kids probably won’t be adopted out of the home, but will leave the home when the “grow up” and set out in Aflao ready to live the rest of life.  I realized as we were belting out worship songs that these kids have the potential to be the next community, church, and national leaders in Ghana.  As Chris and Tammy work with local pastors to find quality people to raise up these kids in the Lord and send them out as adults, not only are they bringing life to the kids themselves, there is potential to reach so many more as they go on to lead lives of action in a world that needs Christ! 

Over the course of the last couple of weeks we have also gotten to know all the pastors in the area who are involved in this ministry.  There are a bunch of churches and pastors all working with Chris and Tammy to bring the children’s home into reality.  It’s been really awesome to have time to just sit down and talk with them and to have to opportunity to see the same God that I know back in the States walking with them in Africa.  Even though we live worlds away and our lives look really different, God is the same God, teaching us many of the same things.  Also, thanks to Pastor Samson, they all call me Boss now, which is fun.  Honestly not quite sure how that happened, one day Pastor Samson just started to call me that as a joke and now they all do, it makes me smile-hence to title of this post :)