Every week, the squad spends Thursdays as “Activation” days. The AIM Guatemala staff lead the morning with worship, a sermon, and time with God. The afternoons are for ATL, which stands for “Ask the Lord”. Each team asks God what He wants us to do and where He wants us to go. Then, we obey and see what God does.
The first few times my team did ATL, we were disappointed. Most of us felt like we did not receive any clear direction from God. We know He still worked through us on those days, but we couldn’t really see it. However, this week, things changed.
Instead of choosing a place to go and assuming God would work through it, we took time to pray. Everyone took 10 minutes alone to ask God where He wanted us to go and then we came back together to discuss. Everyone agreed that God wanted us to go to Parramos, one of the towns near us. We didn’t know what He wanted us to do except love others well and keep our eyes open for what He wanted to show us.
We took the bus to Parramos and after arriving, we spent a couple minutes praying for our time. Immediately after we finished praying, a drunk man walked up to us. We talked with him and prayed over him for awhile. Some of my teammates went into the nearby store and bought him water and a snack.
Afterwards, Chloe, one of my teammates, and I were walking to the coffee shop we love, and another drunk man walked up to us.
(Quick note: Prior to that day, none of us had interacted with any drunks in Guatemala. It was clearly God directing us to love and minister to them that day)
Chloe and I start to talk with this second man and we learn that he hurt his head the previous day. We could see the cut and dried blood down his face. We were able to buy him medicine and pray over him. Then, two more of my teammates joined us and we bought him lunch and water. We prayed for him again and I talked with him about God’s forgiveness. He kept mentioning how he asks for forgiveness every day, and I tried to share how God forgives us completely in Jesus.
Overall, we were amazed at all God did through us that day! He literally brought people to us for us to love. All the other times we did ATL, I felt like I needed to search for what God wanted me to find. Really, all He wanted me to do was stop, seek Him, and let Him do all the work. As we surrender our time to God, He will use it for His glory.
A posture of prayer made all the difference. I’m excited to see what else God will bring to my team as we continue to seek Him!
Hi all – the process for this appears to be: you can see the stories any time on the new link, but if you want to be notified when new ones are posted then you have to register (create an account on missional.life). When you are logged in, you can go to https://missional.life/sophia-engman and select the “follow” button. Then the request will be pending until Sophia can connect and authorize.
Feel free to acc or correct if anyone has found something different.
That should be “add or correct”. Also, other options may present themselves (maybe not requiring a login?) once they get used to the new platform.