ATL not “ATL”

The last week we were in Columbia. My team and I did something called ATL or ”ask the Lord”. ATL is when you intentionally pray and ask the Lord what He wants for you. During this week we were specifically asking what He wanted us to do for ministry and where He wanted us to go. 

My team and I prayed together and separately over the course of the 3 weeks prior to allowing the Lord to show us what to do during our ATL time. He brought the city of Cartigena to Katy,  one of my teammates,  and so we all prayed about it and felt peace. So since we decided that then it was time to figure out how to get there, where to stay, what to do there and all the other logistics. 

As we prayed for the specifics and logistics, Steph, our teammate/team leader, said why don’t we just book bus tickets and that’s it. So we prayed about it and decided it was an amazing idea. We wanted to give the Lord all the space we had to move. Our theme for ATL became, “as you go”. Which means we don’t need to always plan everything out to impact people or for God to move. God is gonna move, so let’s have fun with it. Ministry is life and life is ministry. 

ATL started with a 15hr bus ride from Medellin, Columbia to Cartagena, Columbia. When we got off the bus it was 9pm at night. The first miracle was when someone came up to us and invited us to a restaurant and we started calling hostels. We called one and they had a group of 7 (which was the amount of people we had) not show, leaving a room available. There was already a guy in the room, because that’s how hostels work, when we got there. We were trying to be quiet, since it was 11pm, and he (the stranger) got out of his bed and welcomed us in English because he is actually from California. What are the odds, right? 

The next couple of days we keep talking to this guy, his name is Mark, and find out he likes doing volunteer work. We invited him to do ministry with us and he said yes. He came along with us everywhere we went and we got to share our stories and he shared his as well. Then we decided to move hostels and he moved with us, because 8 is better than 7. 

Our teammate, Lucas, shared his passion to help people on the streets because we see a great need. We make fundraising posts on social media to get the word out and gain the financial support to be able to put care packages together. Care packages contained water, bread, soap, hand sanitizer, snacks, Gatorade, masks, and other essentials. To buy the things we used mostly local businesses in the area that we were staying to bless them, because Covid-19 has been hard on small businesses. Once we put them together there was no elaborate plan needed to give them out. We just carried them when we went to town and when we saw someone in need we gave them a bag. We talked if they wanted to talk and prayed with them. It was such a blessing and it was so fun. 

It was such a different experience to see us just allow God to work in our everyday life. The most planning we did was our bus tickets and fundraising. Other than that, we were going pretty day to day. It was encouraging, especially since we were getting ready for the race to come to an end and we will be going back to the day to day. It was fun to get to practice and I can’t wait to do ATL again in South Africa. 

-Elizabeth:)