Hola from los calles de Maracaibo! (the street of Maracaibo),
I hope you all are well and it´s been encouraging to hear from some of you. I
thank you again for your prayers and I know God is working faithfully because of
your inter cession.
God has been teaching me so much and continually been opening my eyes, ears,
heart, and mind to things that I know he will use to prepare me for the future.
I have so much to say.
But first line of business: Trinidad
There´s so much to say but know for sake of time I will hit on th important
points.
It was such a blessing and such the work of God for me to be able to go to
Trinidad. It was a place I had never considered going to before but God took me
there to teach and to touch (and by teaching and touching I don´t mean but just
me doing so for God, but God doing so to me!).
I praise God for the young people that were on our team. Their dedication and
passion to the trip was encouraging and challenging. There were 12 of us on the
team: 8 team members from the ages of 15-17 and 4 of us as team leaders. Practically all of our
team members had been on Touch the World missions trips before (the organization
that I went with) so it was mostly us leaders who had to learn the ropes of
traveling with Touch the World.
This was one of the first times when I had not been a head leader and so God
taught me a lot about different styles of leadership and continued to humble my
strongúp front personality. We as leaders had incredibly different
personalities but God used it to his glory to teach each of us something in the
area of leadership to encourage each other in our weaknesses. I am so thankful
for the other leaders and their honesty, humility, and love for Christ that
really challenged me to focus on having a personality and heart for Christ.
There's so much more I could say about me team and the leaders but I will save
that for later, I want to touch on a few experiences that impacted my heart.
One of the most eye opening ones to the phrase: you never know who you´re going to impact for Christ, was when we went to our second
VBS and the church decided to do an offering and as I was setting up the music
for puppets, I felt a spur of the moment push from God to do a song in sign
language during the offering. I signed with a girl from out group ´How great i
our God´ during the offering and felt this incredible happiness when we had
finished. I was sure the kids didn't understand the signs but hope it had at
least ministered to their hearts the idea of praising God in other ways. Later
the young lady I signed with from our group approached me and informed me that
there was a deaf girl at the 2nd VBS who had begun to cry during our song
because she was deaf and knew sign language and yet had never seen anyone ever
do sign language outside of her school and she was just overwhelmed that we were
able to do a song. I was so elated that I sought her out and was able to meet
and talk to her in sign as well as meet her mother. I had forgotten a lot of
sign yet God allowed me to recall some of the signs to talk to her for a bit. I talked
with her mother a bit and was encouraged when she said she was trying to learn
sign yet there were hardly any books in Trinidad that taught sign. I´m
encouraged by her mothers determination to learn sign so she could better
communicate with her daughter and have resolved to mail her my book of sign
language upon returning to the US.
God´s lesson of the day: use all your abilities to God no matter how bad you may
thing you may be at them because you never know who you´re going to touch.
There´s so much more I want to say and will continue to talk about them more in
future email's, but knowing that this one is getting rather long I will touch on
one more quick experience. I´ve seen a lot of poverty in traveling to
developing countries, and working with homeless people in Harrisonburg my eyes
have been opened to many things. But I have never seen so much sickness in my
life until Trinidad. We were out street evangelising one day and on the bus ride home we passed a number of people who had gimp legs or a
disformed part of the body. My heart broke when I saw a man with one arm eating
out of a trash can and our eyes made contact as we drove by, his mouth stuffed
with whatever scraps he had found. On the other side I saw a man who had boils
as we drove on by. Now I´ve never seen boils in my life but I just knew it was
them and that it is a disease that must torture a human, body and soul. I saw
so many more things and my heart broke for each person. I didn´t know what I
could do except uplift a prayer for each one. I´ve never seen such physical
affliction in all my life and it opened up a new part of my heart that has a
compassion for such people. I only pray that God will use this experience to
his glory and will give me the mind and the voice to tell others about it and
move them into action. It´s hard being so young and surrounded by such
affliction, I feel so small sometimes but I know my God is a great God and has a
will and plan for everything. I only wish I could have captured those peoples in
pictures to take back to the US, but I didn´t. But they are forever captured in
my mind.
Bueno, I pray God continues to work in my heart and mind and use me to work in
the heart and mind of others and again I thank you for your prayers and continue
to pray for each of you. I can´t wait to share more and pray that I will never
forget anything I experience so I may tell it all in full detail in the future.
I love you all and will write to you again soon. This week I am just seeing the
sites of Venezuela, resting, fellowshiping, and spending time with God as he
continues to teach me so much and I just thirst for his word and his presence
each day. The amazon is drawing near and I´m preparing with much expectation ad
excitement. Continue to keep the team in your prayers, for finances, for the
people we are going to minister to, for safety ad health, and for the heart and
mind of each person going. God is going to do great things.
By faith,
Cassandra
1 John 5:14-15