God is faithful and he never ceases to show his people his goodness and love. Before I went to Tijuana for our Mexico Mission God was already working on my heart to be a leader. A few months back my leader asked me to think of five “I am” statements that God was placing on my heart. These “I am” statements were specifically things I wanted to work on being. One of my statements was, “I am a leader.” God was faithful to show me that I was a leader, quite literally. I was asked to lead our Mexico Mission team this year, and I was in complete awe of how God was working and moving in my life to even fulfill a truth I didn’t believe in before.
This past May we visited City of Refuge in Tijuana, Mexico with the hopes and prayer God would reveal himself as their loving Father. Our theme for this trip was “United in Love” and truly I felt united with our team and united with the family in Love.
Every night we shared in a time of devotion through worship, word and prayer. Something God placed in my heart was the value and importance of family, especially to children who came from broken families and parents who couldn’t afford to raise them. Our first night I shared 1 Corinthians 13 with the children and I spoke of how God showed his love to them through their parents; their new parents at the orphanage. I asked them to gather around their parents and lay their hands on them to pour prayers of thanksgiving and love. One by one each child was eager to speak words of thankfulness and blessings for their parents, and each child was proficient and confident in prayer because at City of Refuge each child is taught the importance of prayer. Then our team members began to prophesy and pour words of encouragement over the parents, Evelyn and Obed. As we shared this moment together I began to feel God mending broken hearts through the unity of his love. We all felt our Father’s love, and I knew God was touching and sealing the hearts of his children.
We were able to experience God’s love through prayer, worship and word, but we were also able to experience God’s love just in the quality time we spent with the children. We even gave Evelyn and Obed the night off, where they were taken out to have a nice dinner while the rest of our team stayed home and fed, played and prepared each child for bed. In that very moment I felt this intimacy with the children, as if they were our own. God was building a relationship between our church, Living Hope Christian Center and the children at City of Refuge. He was binding our families together, and truly only through the grace of our Father are we able to unite in one love.