#BR2012 Recap (Post 1) Wayyyy Past Due

I honestly don't have any idea where to start with this blog. So many things happened that I would love to talk about. I would love to go day by day, but our days sort of ran all together.

The first night, we got there and I felt like I was at Church camp. The first thing we did was go in to get our dinner and we saw some people we knew right off the bat, which I wasn't actually expecting at all. Then we decorated our vans and there were people everywhere, playing games, singing/jamming, and just hanging out getting to know new people. It was pretty cool. At one point I couldn't help but just smile at the fact that we we're all down there for one reason and that was to share the love of Jesus Christ. We were all connected by the Holy Spirit. We were all one body. It blew my mind a little bit. Then after we got done at the church at Port Isabel we drove over the bridge to South Padre. We were told to split up into groups and pray for others and get to know them a little bit. So we did, I got so pumped about the week, after, or I guess really it was during this time, because I knew that we were all down there to share the love of Jesus, and spread the gospel, but I hadn't really understood that all these other people's hearts were truly in it to serve the Lord, and have compassion for the people we encountered. After praying with a bunch of them and just seeing the hearts that were out there, I got really excited about the week.

The next day, after I was so pumped up, I woke up in a great mood, but then before we even had breakfast, a couple of people in our group got on my nerves for some reason, just little things they said or did for some reason made me mad (which they didn't even know they did), and then I got a text message that made my mood even worse. I was almost instantly in a bad mood and annoyed to say the least. I tried not to let that get me down for the day though and I asked the Lord to give me some peace, and to help me focus on what I was there for. He definitely gave me that peace. The focus part, well to say that Satan was at work pretty hard this week I think would be an understatement. I felt like there were distractions all around me, everyday and I had to be in constant prayer about being in His will and being focused on what I was there for. It kinda seems weird because of all the preparation that went into it, you would think that I would have been 100% focused, but that wasn't the case. The cool part was that I told my sister and Whitney and I know they were praying for me and I was praying about it, and there were people at home praying about our week, and then occasionally in the group someone would pray and ask God to keep us all focused and it was so cool, because in the down time or when we were just riding to pick people up my mind could be 1000 different places, but when it came to talking to people and sharing the word and the truth with the people we came in contact with, I couldn't think about anything else except for that. It was really cool to see just for myself that the Lord was working and I wouldn't even realize it at first. But he says in Jeremiah 29:13, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. "

I feel like that is what each and everyone of us were doing this week. I was so blessed to be a part of a group whose entire hearts were so evidently seeking to do the Lord's work and wanting to be completely selfless and made to be vessels for the kingdom of God. It was so incredible to be in a place that I got to see the body really and truly working with one unified spirit, the Holy Spirit and it was so unmistakable. The Holy Spirit was moving and working in people's lives like I have never in my own life witnessed and it was just as awesome to be able to pray for each other as we were out in vans or on the beach.

In what we called HQ (Island Baptist Church) we had a prayer room. It was wonderful! They called it an active prayer room, because it wasn't just a "come in and be quiet" type of place. It was somewhere that everyone could go and pray out loud, or in a group, or to themselves, but the coolest part about the prayer room was the tweet screen. The people out in vans and on the beach could tweet and say "pray for a certain person" or tweet and ask for prayer in the van in general or just whatever was going on. Immediately people could lift up needs and prayer requests. The even cooler part is that people at home could also see the prayer wall online and could be praying. If I learned nothing else this week (which I did, but if I hadn't) it would be that I already thought that there was power in prayer, but I was so blessed to be able to see that there is POWER IN PRAYER, like I've never been able to experience or witness before.