God is Present!

Greetings from San Diego (my future home). I mean I'm just going to start out by saying that this post is not going to do my experiences justice at all. This past week has been powerful - reallll powerful. I'm genuinely in awe of the presence of God.

Ministry on campus has been going well. One thing I've been learning is how to define success in ministry. For us that means going out in the Spirit initiating conversations and leaving the results up to God. It's easy to define success as the number of people who come to Christ, the number of people coming to our weekly meetings, the number of people who we share the Gospel with, so on so forth. The great thing is God has a plan laid out before us in regard to the Destino movement and we can have full confidence in that. This makes worry and discouragement not a big factor in our ministry.


The week started out slow, but on Tuesday my sharing partner and I had 5 encouraging conversations with Latinas which is not the norm for us on campus. So that was super great to see how God placed us in the path of these woman all in one day, all who seemed to have genuine interest in the Destino movement. God's been really great about leading us to people who maybe need the reminder of the Gospel, or sometimes people who have never heard the Gospel explained to them before. I have heard a lot of great stories from my team members and there's no doubt God's at the center of this movement.

We had our weekly meeting tonight and we actually had a few people show up - not a lot - but a few. :) I got to spend time with a girl named Courtney and a few of us ended up hanging out at her apartment after the meeting. One of the things we've been praying for is not just encountering people on a one time basis but starting relationships that actually mean something, so that was awesome! She wants to hang out with us this Saturday too - God's super cool like that.

I think going on this summer project I didn't really believe that I needed to be changed too drastically. I came with the intent of God using me to share His love and I had very much a servant mentality for this summer. Yeah, apparently I needed more work than I thought. haha. Through my discipleship time God has revealed A LOT of truth to me. (So thankful for Bridget!!!!) I have had quite the identity crisis this week. Who doesn't love a good one of those? But really, it's a good thing. I have placed my identity and security in so many faulty things of this world (a lot of which I had no clue). You see, I have great head knowledge of who I am in Christ. I know what He has done for me. However, knowing is differently from genuinely believing. Apparently,  I blame myself for most things that have happened in my life - yeah, that's not good - just don't do it. Pushing situations under the rug has been my cop-out and I'm paying for it now. This may sound crazy, but I have never allowed myself to see how broken I truly am. It's so humbling and slowly it's starting to make the meaning of the cross much more significant and relevant. Golly, it's difficult. The question of the summer for me is, "Who am I?" I hope that I can soon answer that question in a confident manner of who I am in Christ - and BELIEVE it.

Mucho amor,
Ashley