Welcome to Malaysia!!

Hey everyone!

So I’ve been in Malaysia less than a week, we haven’t started ministry yet, and the Lord has shown me so much already.

First off, God is literally so big, it’s insane. I’m here in a country that’s halfway around the world in a church where the people don’t speak our language, and we worship the same Lord. We were all standing and lifting praise up to the Lord and our cultures are completely different. It was really eye-opening.

Also, language doesn’t matter at all to God, He is so much greater than that. I already have a couple different testimonies to match that. So on Thursday, we had an orientation on the culture a little bit, but mainly on the ministry we’ll be doing. After the orientation, we had split up into groups that were doing different things. My group was with this man from the church (I’ll have to get his name because I don’t know how to spell it yet), and he had us sing verses from a bunch of different worship songs of our choice. During each song, he would pray over us and have us focus on receiving one of the fruits of the spirit. We did this until we had gone through all nine of them. He was praying over us in his language, yet I could feel the Holy Spirit’s presence and I could feel joy and peace flooding me. I had no idea what he was praying because I don’t understand his language, but we have the same Spirit inside of us that is communicating and understanding. It was such a cool thing to experience. Also, there is something so amazing about hearing people pray and sing in a different tongue and knowing that they’re doing it to the same Lord as you.

We were at church on Friday (the whole service was in their language), and the pastor asked that one person from the squad would sit at the end of the row (against the wall) and pray and intercede the entire service, and ask God that the people would have open minds and hearts to take in what was being preached. I think that it’s amazing how much belief they express about the power of prayer. That’s definitely an area in my faith that I would like to practice more.

So a few of us went to a seminar yesterday, and once again, it ended up being in a different language the entire time. This didn’t stop God from revealing Himself and speaking to us in the slightest. In fact, one of the guys said he thinks he heard more from the Lord during that seminar than he ever has before. All three of us were individually praying from the start that God would allow us to understand what was being said, though none of us knew it at the time. I personally was asking God to allow me to understand if that would be the greatest testimony to His power, and after a while of praying that, each time I would ask to understand I just heard “have faith” interrupting me. So, I did. The only English during the 8 hours of us being there was on some slides that had the topic name, and some verse occasionally, and I left that building with 6 pages of notes. I found this out later, but we were singing a song that had names of God and then the phrase “thammai velipaduthuveer”. We were singing this before the teachings started, and right after that we had started praying that the Lord would allow us to understand and that He would reveal Himself, and He did. Anyways, the next day I looked up what that phrase meant, and it means “He will reveal Himself”. Literally what are the odds of that. God is so crazy and amazing for that. I found that out and I couldn’t stop laughing because it was just so crazy and amazing to me.

So yea, it’s just crazy to me how much the Lord has shown me so far and I haven’t even been here for a week, nor have I started ministry yet.

Before I end, I want to talk about the people here really fast. They are so nice and hospitable, it’s so sweet. They pay for our food and they offer to buy us food or drinks so often. The first day we were here me and Karis were sitting at a table drinking out of a coconut, and one of the workers saw me trying to take a picture, and he offered to take our picture for us. I feel like people here are a lot nicer as a whole than we are back in America, which is kind of sad. I think that as Christians we could do so much better at just being openly kind and loving to everyone around us, especially in public, because that’s how we can minister to people and show them the love of Jesus, even if we don’t explicitly share Christ with them.

Anyways, that’s all I have for this week. We’re starting ministry this week, so if yall could be in prayer for that, we would greatly appreciate it. If you feel led to help me raise the last 14% of my funds, this is the link to my page.

Love you guys!
~Gabi