God's Timing is Awesome.

Okay, we're checked into our hotel and all we want to do is crash. It's almost 1am here and after the no-sleep-jet-lag-plane-jump dance, we're done. However, we just have to let you know about how Jesus is already taking our feeble expectations and showing us just how big He is. Okay, two things. Pardon the non-sentence sentences, as I said, we're wiped.

Okay, Jesus miracle #1:

We met up with the rest of our crew and flew out of Atlanta. For some reason, one of our team members, Leslie Troyer, had her bags dumped off the plane in Amsterdam. That means she had to leave the secure area of the airport to retrieve her bags, and she could not return until two hours before her flight. Annoying right? Someone messed up. Anyways, Suzie Miller (being the good friend she is) volunteered to stay with Leslie and hang out outside the secure area of the airport.

To make a very long story short, they met a blind man and his wife and told them about Jesus. Multiple times. The man, being a Buddist, was convinced he did some very bad things in his past life to be stricken with blindness. The amazing part of it all is, he had read a whole lot of the Bible throughout his life. He grew up with Christian influences, and had eventually rejected Christ. Suzie gave him several chances to change his mind. "I didn't want to be pushy", she said, "but I knew it was really important to make sure he had every opportunity to trust Jesus."
After several long moments of tense silence, where both Suzie and Leslie could see the battle raging on his face, he decided to reject the truth in favor of what he knew and was comfortable with. During the conversation, he mentioned to Suzie, "I'll probably never see you again."
She didn't miss a beat, but responded with, "I want to see you again with me in heaven because you trusted Jesus, since He is the only way you can get there."

In the end, Leslie and Suzie knew that that bag handler had messed up for a reason: So they could be the vessels by which Jesus could love on and reach out to this man. Please pray for him and what the Spirit is pressing on his heart.

And here we go, Jesus Miracle #2:

There was one big flaw with this Latvia trip: We had no Bibles! Suzie sent an email to the Gideons International about a week and a half before our departure, but we never received any sort of reply. I(Aaron) was kicking myself the last four days for not overnighting a few Bibles from Amazon since we didn't receive word from the Gideons. As many of you know, we've been upgrading to new servers at Tate and unfortunately we've been down for about a week. They might have sent a reply, but regardless we didn't see one.

Guess who was waiting for us at the airport? A pair of Gideons with a large bag of Latvian Bibles! Thank You Jesus! Kim told me several hours before this happened, "Aaron, He's just doing it this way so He gets all the glory and gets to show us just how big He is. Those Bibles will be there. There are tons of people praying. He's going to take care of it. Don't worry!"

I don't know about you, but believing that a random email shot halfway around the world was received, read, and taken care of by someone who didn't even reply back really stretched my faith thin.

Turns out, she was right and I get to (happily) repent for not trusting Him with all the details of this trip.

As David says in Psalm 25:3, "Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame"

Okay, I'm getting all teary-eyed. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your prayers!

We haven't even reached the orphanage yet. We're all in high spirits waiting expectantly for Jesus to stretch our faith even further and to do the impossible.

As we all know, impossible is His stock and trade.

Thank you for praying, and please keep on praying!

-Latvia 2011 Mission Team