Where the Green Grass Grows

Every Wednesday, we have what we call 'Mission Possible Day.' After we have our team worship and sharing, we spend some time seeking God for what He would have us do that day, and then we get ready, go out and do it. A few Wednesdays ago, when we were listening for God's instructions, God showed me a picture of a baby lying in the grass. The grass was really green, like golf-course grass, so when I told everyone what I 'heard' I said 'green grass and a baby.' Which, admittedly, sounded a bit funny, since most grass is green, and for which I received a fair amount of teasing, but hey, that's ok. :) Once we'd all shared, we decided, based on what I heard and what a few of the others on the team had heard, that we would spend the day in three locations: Dam Square, Centraal Station, and Ooster Park (the latter was where the 'green grass' came in, in case you didn't catch that :). We would worship and possibly talk to people about God's love in the first two locations, and in the third we would look around for a baby in the grass and go from there. (I was really feeling a bit silly at this point, but it all works out, I promise :))

We started at Dam Square, where Tika and Nini met two guys who were juggling. Tika asked them to let her try, and they struck up a conversation. The rest of us spoke briefly with the people sitting around us as we sang worship songs. We prayed with the juggling guys and then headed to Centraal Station, and from there to Oosterpark.


The sometimes awkward thing about Mission Possible Day is that if you are the only one to hear a certain thing from God, our leader (Kyunghee) turns everything over to you once you come to doing it. We got to the park, had an amazing Doner Kebab lunch (basically, Gyros...not sure why they don't call them that, but that's what they were, and they were GOOD), and then Kyunghee looked at me and said 'what now?' I stuttered something about walking around the park looking for a baby in the grass, and off we went, doing our best not to look like stalkers or kidnappers. When we finally came upon a woman, lying in the grass playing peek-a-boo with her baby, I almost pretended I didn't see her because I was feeling, by this point, beyond foolish. What kind of weirdo goes baby-hunting in the grass? But, I figured since the whole point of the day was to do WHATEVER God tells us, I'd better take a deep breath and go for it. Besides, if I chickened out, I'd never know for sure if I'd heard God.

I grabbed my friend Tamika and we walked over to the woman. I told her we were missionaries and that we felt that God had told us to come to this park and pray for her baby and ask if she'd mind if we did. She seemed a little wary at first, but she agreed. Once we had prayed and she was satisfied that we weren't going to run off with him, she really warmed up to us and we chatted with her for a while, all about her life and how she'd gone to NYC to dance and gotten pregnant and come home to Amsterdam to have her son. She told us she hopes to dance again someday, but that family was more important right now. We listened and did our best to encourage her. Before the end of our conversation, she let us pray for her, too.

After 15 or 20 minutes, we invited her to come to our church the following Sunday and left to rejoin the rest of the team and fill them in on what had happened. I no longer felt foolish, but instead grateful to God for speaking to me and giving me the courage to follow His lead. During lecture phase, we learned that the Hebrew word for hear, 'Sh'ma'(or something like that :)) actually means 'to hear AND obey,' meaning that if we don't obey God's direction, we haven't really heard it. We also talked about the fact that a lot of times, we don't know if we've actually heard from God unless we step out in faith and obedience and see what happens.

As I write this, we have only 4 more days in Amsterdam and a little over 10 in my DTS. Please join me in praying that my teammates and I would truly HEAR (Sh'ma) from God regarding the next step He has laid out for us on our journey with Him. Thank you so much for your encouragement and prayers as we've travelled this section of the road.