Guest Post by Sarah Brubaker

I hate writing.  If you ask me to put my thoughts about my time in Germany into a painting or a piece of pottery I can easily do that, but to try to put everything onto a piece of paper feels near to impossible. There are many stories, challenges and joys that I could write about and I almost always choose to focus on the story of an individual but I think this time the thing that sticks out more than anything else is the power of prayer and God’s ability to give clear and precise answers.

Getting ready for this trip I watched a sermon, where John Piper said that for some reason God has ordained for prayer to cause things to happen that would not otherwise happen.  One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament is of Elijah and the prophets of Baal.  Elijah comes up against over 800 prophets of Baal. He calls together all of Israel and says you know what, you choose.  I’ll go up against this group of 850 prophets and which ever God shows up and rains down fire on the altar that is the real God and we will follow Him.  So the hundreds of prophets cry out and even cut themselves and nothing happens.  And then Elijah making sure that everyone knows it is God, pours buckets and buckets of water onto his altar, says one quick prayer and God rains down fire that consumes all of the altar, the sacrifice and dries up all the water.  God doesn’t need us. Our God cannot be compared to any other god. God doesn’t need us to prove He is whom He says He is, we just proclaim His name and let Him show up in mighty ways.

The God of this Old Testament story is the same God we serve. We started out the week with prayer and with a time to listen to God and ask Him to guide us in whatever way He desires.  Over and over God showed up.  Each day just the right person with just the right language ability would be at just the right place.  Our group was filled with stories of God giving us the name of a person and then finding that person, of individuals being exactly where God told us to find them, praying to meet women and then minutes later refugee women showing up.

There was one day I felt God encouraging me to speak to a woman sitting near our group and as I begin talking to her she told me right before I came up to her she was praying that good things would come to her; another day we couldn’t find refugees to talk to and so we sat a bit a way from the area we were supposed to be in and began to pray, for the rest of our afternoon every time we finished speaking to a group of refugees another one would show up. This kind of thing happened so many times I can’t possibly list them all.

If I had to sum up my whole trip into one theme or one challenge it would be that I need to pray more and I need to listen more.  Let’s set the stage for God to show up in undeniable ways and point thousands to Himself.

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand upright.” Psalm 20:7-8