God speaks through the day-to-day things

Before going on the mission trip I was a little doubtful of listening prayer.  I have had times where I heard God speak to me, but it was usually when something traumatic had happened to me, and I cried out to Him to help me through it.  I’ve never really tried to pray and ask God to speak to me and show me how he wanted to use me that day; looking for God to give me little clues to indicate that I was in fact doing His will. It was hard for me to believe that God can take little day-to-day things and speak to me about them.  I had only experienced God speaking in the heavy, burdensome things of life. 
 

Each night during our 1-week mission trip in Morristown, TN, we had a time of worship and a time of learning from our project leaders.  During our learning time, one our project leaders spoke of how God had done incredible things in her life through listening prayer.  How he had given her visions of pieces of the journey that was ahead of her that day, and how she had seen those pieces come together as she trusted God to lead her.  This inspired me to at least give this listening prayer thing a try.
 

When my group’s turn came to do Random Acts of Kindness, I met with a 9 year old boy and a 15 year old girl from our Mission Trip group, and we took some time to pray that God would speak to us about how we could be used by him to do Random Acts of Kindness.  We prayed and the 9 year old said he didn’t really see or hear anything. The 15 year old kept hearing a song and the name Rogersville. I saw a black image with red outline, a downtown scene, and lots of the color aqua.  These all seemed to make no sense to us, but we set out anyway.  

We got in my car and just started driving.  This made me quite anxious as I tend to have a need for control and plans, but God has been showing me that I need to learn to trust him more, so I trusted that God would show us the way.  

I asked the 9 year old and 15 year old which direction to go, they said right; we went right and went down a country road, which eventually took us to a highway. Then we felt that going left was where God was leading us.  As we continued on the highway, we saw the sign for Rogersville, so we followed the exit by that sign. We then went past an auto shop with a sign that had a black figure with red outline.  We thought about stopping there, maybe this was the place God was leading us to?  I didn’t really feel like we should stop there, so we continued on.  

We then found our way to downtown Rogersville. We came to a stoplight and I told my group, “we’ve been driving around for 20 minutes now, we really need to just find someone to help”.  So, we noticed woman on the sidewalk near the light we were stopped at, and decided to turn down that road and see if she needed any help.  As we were parking in the parking lot near where the woman was, one of my group members noticed 2 teenage girls on the other side of the parking lot with a ladder and they looked like they needed help.  So, we decided to approach them to see if we could help them.  We told them about “random acts of kindness” and asked we could help them and they directed us inside the building.  

Inside we found another mission trip team working to renovate an old building into a Ministry Center for future mission trip teams.  They welcomed us warmly and put us to work.  We spent the next hour scraping aqua blue paint off of the windows of this building.  When it was time for us to leave, we gathered everyone together and prayed for one another and thanked God for his guidance that day. 
 

Many things amazed me from this experience, one of them was that the mission trip group we encountered were not AT ALL surprised that God had led us to them that day.  It was almost like they said, “Oh, Random Acts of Kindness, listening prayer—God led you here today, yeah that makes sense.”  

Another thing that amazed me is that when I typed our home base location into my GPS, we found that we were only 1 mile away from where we started with our Random Act of Kindness ministry.  God led us down the road and we drove around for 20 minutes before we found his final destination for us.  If we had turned right at first we would have been to that ministry center within 2 minutes, but we wouldn’t have seen the sign for Rogersville and we wouldn’t have seen the sign for the auto repair shop that had a black image with a red outline.  

Sometimes we need to take the long way around for God to bring about his work in us.  I am truly amazed at how God does speak and wants us to hear his will for us even in the every day things of life!