Ok. So long story short, I’m going to Latvia to volunteer with a missions organization called Youth With A Mission (YWAM). If that’s all you need to hear, great! Skip to the bottom. Here’s the long story.
I was working as a part-time receptionist, doodling in my spare time, taking a few pictures here and there, and unsuccessfully job searching— Wow. That sounds just like the beginning of a romcom. Make it stop.—when I decided to take a free class through the church I’d been attending for the past few months. It was called “Hearing the Voice of God” and it changed my entire view of prayer in a matter of hours. The general gist was that prayer is meant to be a conversation and not just you word vomiting into the air hoping that the great wizard in the sky will grant your sparkly little wishes as you slowly fall asleep in the middle of your speech-making. So the person teaching the class suggested we all try something called “listening prayer” which is where you sit in a quiet place with no distractions and you just close your eyes and listen and wait. Which is what I did—and I didn’t hear anything. But I vowed to try again and again until something happened. So for the next few nights before I went to bed, I would ask God if there was anything He wanted to tell me and then I would sit and listen for a while. On about the fifth night or so, I finally got something. It was very swift and ended abruptly, but I knew it was God. Maybe you’ll think I’ve just got an overactive imagination or maybe you’ll go one farther and think I’ve lost my freakin’ marbles, but I know it was God. I just do. Sometimes you just know something without proof or evidence or whatever, and I get that a madwoman can know that she is the Queen of England and believe it wholeheartedly, but this is different. I’m not clinically insane, I’m just a little weird. Now that we’ve covered the state of my mental health, let us move on. My eyes were closed and I saw a flash of red with a white stripe going horizontally through the middle and I thought the word “Latvia” except it wasn’t me thinking it. It was kind of like when a word randomly pops into your head, but it was more than random. It seemed the answer to an unasked question. The problem was I didn’t know the question to the answer. I wasn’t sure what the flash of red and white was because I didn’t remember ever seeing it, but I had a hunch, so I Googled “Latvian flag” and there it was. It was the Latvian flag. The freaking. Latvian. Flag. I knew that Latvia was a place, but I had never known or even cared what their flag looked like. That’s how I know I didn’t imagine all of this. It would be one thing if I had only gotten “Latvia” without the image of the flag or if I had known more about Latvia to begin with, but these are things that had never crossed my mind.
As you might imagine, I was very confused. I had figured out the answer to the first riddle but I was left with more questions as a result. So I did what I would now recommend anyone do if they find themselves in an inquisitorial situation such as mine; I prayed vehemently. Mostly I just asked God what He was trying to say to me. I didn’t want to assume anything and I didn’t want to put words in His mouth, so I just tried my best to listen some more. The result of asking this question was not so much an answer as a reinforcement of what I had already been shown. I suddenly found myself surrounded by variations of the Latvian flag. I would see them on signs, in stores, on the internet, the list goes on. Once, while I was puzzling over my predicament, an old muscle car passed me on the highway sporting the flag in the form of three giant racing stripes that covered the entire top of the vehicle. I could tell that this was clearly something that God really cared about, so I decided to Google missions organizations in Latvia. I figured it was worth a shot since it was the most Jesusy answer to the question, and I was right. There is really only one long term missions organization based in Latvia, and that’s YWAM. I e-mailed the base there and asked a pretty generic question; “If I came and volunteered with you guys, what kind of work would you have me do?” I received an e-mail back asking me what I liked doing and what I was good at because generally that’s what they have their volunteers do. YWAM is all about people using their gifts and talents in ministry. So I told them how I like art and photography and I found out that their photographer is leaving and that they’ll be needing a new one. It’s no coincidence that the one thing I happen to really want to do seems to be the thing they need. In that moment, I knew that this was where I needed to be.
Fast forward to this past January. My family and I went on a cruise and we went to dinner every night in this fancy dining hall. We had assigned tables, so we sat at the same table every night. The first night, there was an empty table between us and the people sitting by the window. I didn’t think much of it except that maybe it would make conversation between us and the window people a tad awkward to navigate. That night, (completely unrelated to the table situation) I was praying, and I asked God to teach me more about Latvians because I was really curious about the culture and what the people were like. The next night at dinner, a middle aged couple sat down at the empty table. We introduced ourselves and started a conversation, and when we asked where they were from guess where they said? Latvia. What. So for a whole week, I got to know them and we learned all about their culture. And we found out later that they hadn’t actually been assigned to that table. For whatever reason, they had asked to be moved from the table they had to the one next to us. Latvia is a country of about 2 million people. So in population size, it’s almost as big as the state of Arkansas at 2.9 million. Imagine the odds of randomly meeting another Arkansan within the United States. Now imagine the odds of randomly meeting another Arkansan on a cruise in the Caribbean. Now imagine the odds of meeting two Latvians on a cruise in the Caribbean. Yeah. Pretty slim. So now I’m going. This is real. It’s going to be one huge, amazing adventure! I have to participate in a training program before I can volunteer with YWAM, so in January I’m off to do what’s called a DTS or, Discipleship Training School, at the YWAM base in San Francisco. I’ll be there for 4 months in lecture style classes and then we’ll be going as a team to Rome, Italy and Greece for the remaining 2 months of the training to help with the refugee crisis. I don’t know exactly when I’ll leave for Latvia, but I assume it will be sometime soon after I return from the DTS. Right now I am fundraising to cover the cost of the DTS tuition, so if you or someone you know would like more information about that, you can contact me in any way you want really. I’m on Facebook, I have e-mail, a phone, etc. Just pick one you like. Thanks for reading if you got this far! I created this blog so that people who have a genuine interest in keeping up with me will be able to do so. So, yeah, I guess that’s about it. If you have general questions unrelated to fundraising, then of course you can ask those too. Just drop me a line. 🙂
Oh, and I don’t know how long I’ll be in Latvia once I get there. I figure I’ll just stay there until God tells me to do something else, haha.
Baltic State of Mind 