Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Leaving for Ecuador

Hello everyone! I wish this was a real update. However, my computer with my really good and long update already written has decided to not turn on anymore! Please pray for I am very much frustrated by it.
Well we are still in Colombia, but probably only until tomorrow or the next day. Over Flow, our suburban, was in a little bit of an accident so that and a few other things that are broken in the other vehicles are being fixed that is the only thing keeping us where we are at this point. Colombia has been amazing! God is so Good and has provided so much for us! Another donation of about $600.00 dollars was given to the team. We are so blessed with all the free housing and food we have been receiving and God just wants to lavish even more of His favor on us. The team is growing a lot. We are now about 30 people more or less we still have one more person joining and a few others leaving....
Thank you for all your prayers and support they are surely needed and mean so much! I will try and get my computer up and working again in order to post a real update very soon!

Love, Rachael Michelle

Monday, 2 January 2012

All Things New!

Happy New Year everyone. First of all I want you all to know How much I miss all of you!

So far God has been doing some amazing things. I have come to find out living the way this team lives, like gypsies, can be very tiring. It is amazing the amount of grace God gives us. Constantly moving from one place to another never really settling anywhere, unpacking and packing is not always the easiest thing, but the purpose of the journey and the promise of pieces of our destinies being fulfilled is worth it all! I am sure I have said this before, but I am so impressed with how we all get along like such a family. I feel like this group of people from all over the world have been brought together to bring a new representation of the church and how the Church is meant to function.

Since Crossing into South America, I am pretty sure the whole team will agree with me on this, the sense of a major shift in the atmosphere has taken place. The original heart of the trip was South America, but because we needed to drive Central America was a must. While in Central America many of the team had said it felt more as if we were plowing the ground for the next group of people God would send to plant the seeds. I really feel in the spirit that because of that there is going to be an abundance of grace and favor while in South America. There seems to be a common theme through the team we heard the call and were the ones to say yes to it. No one really has any idea what is going to happen and what isn't. I guess that is what you get when you say yes to following the Holy Spirit! Everyday On this trip I can feel Jesus breaking my heart more and more for the Latin American people. There are moments where I will just sit and can not help, but weep because all I can feel is the fiery love of God for these people! I am becoming more and more aware of how that is going to be happening every place I go to even after this year or more of this trip.

So far in Colombia we stayed in Cartagena at a YWAM base for about a week. A few of us went to a village the second and God definitely showed up! We sat under a tree and started praying/talking about what we were going to do in the village when two kids show up just wanting us to buy them ice cream. So instead we ask if we could pray for them (a boy and a girl 9 and 10 years of age). They said yes and Holy spirit fell. The little boy gets blasted by the Holy spirit and the little girl starts weeping. They followed us for the rest of the day. Next we just walked and started interceding for the village. We stopped just at a few houses and prayed with the people. Almost every person that came into our path excepted Jesus into their hearts! We stopped at this restaurant hut thing where we told everyone to go get the people of the village we wanted to tell them something! About 40 people showed up and one of the guys on our team, Addison, shared his testimony and spoke about the goodness of God and how He alone can change your life. He then asked that if anyone wanted to truly give their life over to God to stand and repeat the sinners prayer after him. The entire restaurant stood and gave their life. It was so incredible. We prayed for so many people that day and saw so many amazing things. A woman got healed of kidney stones and we prayed for a girl whose mother had died a month earlier and someone had come to her house and told her people from another country were going to come and pray for her, And here we come a week later! Haha Divine appointments are the best. God did so much that day! We had a great Christmas. Food, Family, and God. Not particularly in that order what else do you need for the holidays? After we left Cartagena we had 2 intense days of driving all day long staying where ever we can make camp for the night. Finally get to Bogota and we had made plans to stay at the YWAM base here for a night or so because it was new years, but it was just to expensive and not enough room for us and out vehicles, I am not sure people realize how big of a caravan we are. 25 people, 5 vehicles, 2 of them being huge RV's, 2 trailers on the backs of a suburban and a durango, and the smaller car. Trying to maneuver through Bogota and finding a place to park just wasn't working. So we made our way up the mountain where a guy let us park in his restaurant . We made camp, cooked supper and quickly realized it was going to be a very cold night complete opposite of what we just drove out of. We had a great new years together celebrated and then went to bed where no one actually slept because of the cold. Since we were only allowed one night we had breakfast and made our way further down the mountain where God basically handed us a place to stay for the next 4 nights. $5 a person per night, room for our vehicles, and the city is only a 20 minute drive away! God is good all the time! We got the opportunity to climb a mountain an hour and half hike with very thin air to be honest didn't think I was going to make it a few times, but with the grace of God made it to the top. I have never been in that high of an altitude without being in an airplane. From the top we were able to see all of Bogota. You don't realize it, but it is a massive city! We prayed for the city that God's fire would pour out over it and is presence would be made known and the people would feel a tangible wave of God's love for them. It was an awesome time. The walk down was much easier though! After here who knows what else God has in store!

As we go along it is getting harder and harder to keep up with this blog thing, but I want you all to know what is going on what God is doing because it is amazing! God is doing so much more than I can remember to write about. The little things that He does throughout just one day add up and I am overwhelmed and blown away by His abundant goodness. It is really incredible! I can not express enough to you all what it means to truly hand over your life to God. Just in the past couple of months on this trip my life will never be the same. I still have no clue what God has in store for me on this trip, but I can feel it in the deepest parts of my spirits my life will never be the same because of it I have learned so much and am growing every day more and more. The cry of my heart is “to always be found on a mission about my Father's business” whatever that looks like! When I was praying the other day I was asking God for more. More relationship, more revelation, more hunger, more passion. I heard God say go back to the beginning. Then I saw the New testament. So I started reading and I quickly realized most of what I was reading I knew in my head, but not in my heart. I believe He is bringing me and many others into a season of refining. A season of revelations being moved from our heads to our hearts!
I can not believe it is already 2012. Whenever I say the 2012 my heart jumps! In my spirit I can feel things are about to happen! These are exciting times people! Get prepared. It is never to late!

A lot happened in Panama We saw so many healings and people just being captured by the love of God. One quick story... One night we went into Panama City to on of the most dangerous areas to an apartment building. As we walked inside we had no clue what we were doing, but there were kids everywhere so we played and blessed the kids and began to pray for many of the people. That night a woman who had not walked in a year because of TB got out of her wheelchair and walked by herself! We heard later on that week that she was still out of her wheelchair! Yes God! Another man that a bunch of the guys had prayed for said that, that next night he was planning on robbing a bank and He had a dream and he couldn't go through with it and he excepted Jesus into his heart just because of the dream He had!


Okay I am finished now! Thank you all so much for your support and prayers! You are truly investing directly into the Kingdom of God! I know and pray you will be blessed a hundred fold of what you have blessed me with!

Love and many blessings,
Rachael Michelle Singleton