Renewed Faith

I have been going through a rough time the last month and to be honest I have been having trouble with my faith! It has felt like I have been in this same storm for the last 4 - 5 years of my life and it started to seem endless to me. I have been in this restless place of knowing what I want in my life and yet I have had to follow God so He can take me through the journey His way to get where I am supposed to end up. Its been a hard journey and I guess you could say that through the process my faith started struggling. I just didn't know if my time was ever going to come or if I was forever just going to be giving and obeying God! 

Everyone has been telling me these last two months that my time of receiving was coming but I just haven't been able to see it at all. Until I got here to Malaga, Spain! My team was having a time of intercession/worship on Wednesday and lets just say God showed me that miracles do really happen after all...to ME! People started praying out things that they needed to lay down to God and God started sweeping us onto our knees. My classmate, Autumn, that was just recently healed from a broken back three weeks ago, said that were was something God was telling her to do so she was just going to do it. She grab her camera, stood up, and handed it to me, saying God wants me to give this to you! 

God had actually told her three days ago to do it but she wanted to make sure it was God...as I think all of us would. Her faith had just been restored when God healed her recently so now she has the faith to know that God can give her a new one and she just needed to step out in this. God was using her that just had her faith restored in the same situation I was in to restore my faith! It was all a part of God's longtime planning! 

However, that isn't the end of this story! I have also been asking God to heal my body for longer then I can count and I didn't see it changing! As everyone continued to vocally lay things down to God, God continued to touch me in ways I haven't felt for a while. He kept pushing me to speak out what He was doing in my life at that moment for my team to hear but I just didn't know how. After about 30 minutes of putting it off I started talking about the season i have been in and out of no where I started telling my team that I was heal. The fact is that I'm pretty sure that I have been for 2 weeks or so but its just been so long that I was scared to say it in fear of it not really being true! In order for me to start believing it though God needed me to speak it over my life in front of everyone! 

[Royal Palace in Paris, France]

I still have some recovering to do physically that might take a while but I know that if I keep going through this process with God that I will come out on top being totally healed of everything that has been wrong with me! I can also say that in life I feel like I can declare that this is my time and my season of receiving from God what He really has in store for my life. I know that God is going to change everything in life for me and I'm going to come out completely different. Finally in life this is My Time and I'm excited for the journey as hard as it might continue to be! 

Paris, France

We had a week of travel to get from Amsterdam to Spain, so we broke up into groups to see more parts of Europe. I ended up going to Paris, France with another girl in the school for two days and then we planned on heading down to Spain! We took the bus from Amsterdam to Paris, France where we stayed for 3 nights and 2 days! 

[On the Belgium grass, busing it to Paris]

After sitting in the bus for 9 hours to Paris, we checked into our hostel, and got sandwiches to eat in the park across from our hostel, immediately falling in love with Paris! That next morning we set out to see as much as we could with a photocopied pieced together map and ended up literally walking across the city that day seeing more then we imaged. 

[Tons of tiny Jenn's & Emily's at the Royal Palace]

Prymaids in Paris

Royal Palace

Norte Dame

[me and Emily]

Arch de Triomphe

[me and Emily]

View Outside our window

The Second day we went to the Tour de Eiffel and spent about 3 hours there walking around taking pictures after pictures. Then after dinner, a nap, and warm clothes we headed back out for the night to see the Tour de Eiffel at night. So we could get the full atmosphere and what it was all about! 

Amsterdam, Neitherlands

We were in Amsterdam for 3 weeks really learning about the history of Europe, government/economy, and stuff about the Middle East. It was really interesting looking at how Europe and specifically how everything in Amsterdam got started. When you look at everything that is going on within the City, it is amazing to see that the Netherlands were founded on Christianity more then any other place, yet they couldn’t seem more away from Christianity then any country. It just really shows that when God’s hand is on a place so much that is where Satan is going to try to tare it down as much as he can. I was challenged in the area of government and economic. I think as Christians we pull away from that area in our society because it is so “worldly” when that is one of the places that we should be getting involved in more then ever. 

While I was in Amsterdam I started working on night photography, which is something that I have never really explored before in a serious way. I know God wants to take me to a deeper place in my photography, so this was one of the ways that I have started doing it. There was a carnival in the center of town that I went to shoot a lot of photos at. It was something fun to explore doing and seeing what all I could do with my photos! 

In the YWAM base that we were staying at there was a prayer tower that overlooked the whole city and got to see God beauty in the meantime. As we prayed over the city, our team, and more God really started showing us more and more of His presence and heart for our team. The heart God gave us for the injustice in this world and the fight that we are trying to make for it, He continued to renew us and constantly fill us back up!

As I walk down the streets of the Red Light Districted my heart is literally torn out and trying to understand where is God, is impossible! There are no quick answers to explain what happened here and how things have gotten so bad. Walking the streets with red lights along all the buildings and women standing in the windows in bad enough to see but then you have to watch the way these women are treated. Its like people are looking for the newest fashion window shopping. Groups of men and tourists walk past a window, start pointing, and talking about what they see. They walk up close to the window to examine the "thing" thats there. Its just not something that makes sense! How did our world come to this place of being so broken that we have women standing in window to be sold for sex and men that come from all around the world to satisfy a need within them! My heart is so broken for the world I live in and that all I want to do is fight for it anyway I can! Standing up against a world of injustices with God, prayer, the Word on my side, and my camera!

The second we all get to Amsterdam and within the community, God poured into our hearts the desire to be in the community and making an impact some way! The YWAM base that we lived at while we were there started a Prayer Tabernacle in the middle of the Red Light District, so our team spent as much time over there as we could. 

As we went in groups to pray over the city, God started putting a lot on our hearts individually to do something within the District for the prostitutes. A group of about 12 of us that really felt like God was calling us to buy a ton of rose, pull messages on them and then splitting up into couples to go to the door of the prostitutes giving them a flower. It was hard at first to get the courage to go up to each window but as we did God started working. These women whole faces changed as they got handed a flower. There were women that just stood there staring at it like an 8 years little girl again, others asked why we would do something like that. We would tell them different things that God laid on our hearts like you are not forgotten, you are loved without a price and many more. One of the groups even got a chance to sit down with one of the women and really just hear her story and minister to her by just wanting to listen. The response was amazing and it felt like we just didn’t have enough roses to give away!