The past few days have been amazing and tonight at 8pm I will be boarding a plane to head to Swaziland for the next month! I had the opportunity to finally meet my team that I will be spending the next month with in Swaziland! It is a group of 11 beautiful girls plus me and the Wallace family, 18 total! It has been a week of laughs, ups, downs and challenges from team builders and powerful messages to hang out time and late night dance parties.
Taking on the role of a leader has been quite the experience. I came really excited to see what I could bring to the table with my community experiences and with all the changes that I have experienced over the last few months. I will be honest, my first impulse was to force my community experiences on this new team. I know the mistakes we’ve made and lessons we’ve learned while here in Community Life and I so badly wanted to make sure this team understood all of that. God quickly showed me that He was in control of this team and things would happen in His timing. I couldn’t make anything happen. The “deep” and “transforming” things had to be left up to God to do within our group. One of our last nights we had a talk on rights and expectations. It was great because it allowed us to evaluate what we were expecting for this time and what we need to give over to God for control. I surrendered my team and pressures to make the team into something, to the Lord realizing that I had a lot of expectations of how things “should be” or what people should do. I then looked at my team and immediately saw the Lord moving. They were praying for each other and ministering to one another. Things that clearly were prompted my the holy spirit and clearly nothing that I did to force an agenda. I realized that it was God Himself working in and though us!
As we go through next month, trying to figure out what this community will look like for us as we come with all different kinds of gifts and personalities, I realize that what we will have in common is our God and our need for each other. We will struggle with missing home, not having the same convienences and lack of personal space. The great thing about this? We will not be alone as we walk through these times. We will have each other, and that will be the solution to the things we face. That will be a promising outlook for our time; each other.
As I write this and as I sat through this training I couldn’t help but think over my time in community. They have become my family and trutfully what I look to for my solution in trouble times and really for normalcy. I don’t think I really got it until this weekend but my community has been my cure. It has been what has healed me and walked with me througout this time and keeping me crazy and sane at the same time. I am so grateful for them and see that what has kept us going through this time has been them, Christ in them! The whole time it was nothing I or any one person was doing and everything God was doing in and through them.
I hope to continue to see that manifest more on this trip. Please keep us in your prayers and check out [email protected] for updates of our ministries, how we are doing and what’s going on in general. Thanks to all of you for your support! Also keep my finances in mind as I continue to raise 1500 more to get to my goal.
Love you all so much!
i love you teresa!!!
so glad that i’ve been able to be a part of your community this year! keep stepping up in leadership and be who you were made to be!!
What a great team you are!… I second Amanada – “keep stepping up in leadership and be who you were made to be!” Pour into those girls. You do it so well.
You are missed already.