Before heading off on the World Race, I had the honor of preaching at LifeHouse Shenandoah, my church in Virginia. The message that the Lord put on my heart was about living for God through the expression of the scripture Isaiah 52:7 which says, “How beautiful on the mountain are the feet that bring good news.” During a large duration of the sermon, my Spirit was completely wrapped up in the phrase “on the mountain”. In this verse Isaiah prophetically sees a joyous messenger bringing the good news of Judah’s redemption after a waging war. This foretells the redemption and salvation story that the disciples would carry across nations, lands, territories, and villages. The Good News of Jesus Christ bringing peace, life, and salvation was on its way! Even with some context of the scripture, I still find myself asking why isn’t the scripture, ‘How beautiful are the feet that bring good news’? That makes more sense to me, and it clearly made more sense to Paul when he quoted this piece of scripture in Romans 10:14-15 where he literally talks about carrying and sharing the Gospel. What is so important about the mountain?
Mountains are mentioned 500 times in the bible. They often symbolize a nearness to God, because the summit of a mountain was the closest one could get to heaven.The mountain is also thought to contain divine inspiration, and it is the focus of pilgrimages of transcendence and spiritual leveling up. I preached and taught about being “on the mountain”, and compared how hard it is to get up a mountain while sharing the gospel with foreign lands. Then brought in the importance of having our complete attention on God because that is what enables us to live for God fearlessly and boldly walking into our mission field where our feet are.
Little did I know, in about two months I would be on my own mountain expected to practice what I preached, literally. I have spent the past five weeks living in a tent on a mountain in Guatemala. My team and I have lived with no phone service, no refrigerator, no electricity, no showers, and very limited water. One of my teammates and I lived in our tents in a cabin under construction (to try and avoid the straight downpour of rain that ended up flooding the cabin anyway) where we encountered our rat(s) friend who kept us company for a long while. We were so close in company that after the intense rainy season ended, we moved our tents outside and stayed there for the rest of the beautiful time we spent on the mountaintop.
The rising sun woke us up every day and we all would have deep devotion time with our Abba Father, eat breakfast, and start work at about 9am. All the days we worked we did some sort of manual labor that was essentially preparing the mountain, which is called Prayer Mountain, to soon become an oasis for families and missionaries to come and just be with each other and with God. The first week we worked on clearing miles of land filled with sticks and forest things. To do this, one of my teammates, Sarah, used a machete. It was kind of scary because she was swinging it around like a crazy person, so our host told us that we couldn’t use the machetes anymore.
The second week was leveling grounds with hoes and shovels, and working on getting water up to the cabin and in the bathrooms. The water well was about a mile and a half down a treacherous hill, so there was an incident of my team carrying a water pump up the muddy hill (lol hard in the moment, but good memories, honestly I wasn’t even present). The third week we had a whole list of things to do. My team dug a trench, repatched the dirt in the road, and worked on the construction of the cabin and bathrooms.
On Fridays, we would hike three miles up the mountain to a small village to do sports ministry with the kids in school and then do house visits in the afternoons. These were my favorite days because they were incredibly fun. After a long week, we would go play with kids and visit with people. We would teach Bible stories through skits, listen to people’s stories, encourage families, and pray for them. It was a sweet and precious time that the Lord blessed us with. By the end of the day, we would have walked about nine miles total coming back to our mountain home.
The days were long and the work was insanely hard. I was physically challenged every day, which forced me to learn how to receive love and help from my teammates. I learned how to be in constant communication with God in this; seeking and asking for His strength to do this kind of ministry work. I’m so grateful for all that this taught me and the character development that I went through in the process of physically demanding work.
My absolute favorite part about the mountain was the time I got to spend with God. Our ministry host told us in the beginning that our time with God was essential and even more important than the work we were doing for him. He truly was a blessing that mentored, discipled, and encouraged us to deeply seek the Lord. There were many days where my team and I would spend time working and then beg to go and read our bibles. Then we would come together to ask each other questions and discuss scripture for hours at a time. I was blessed with time to simply reside in the presence of my Father and to delight in His Word.
The last week of ministry on Prayer Mountain was busy and hard, but also insanely incredible. My ministry host gave me the assignment to look in the Bible for scriptures that talked about mountains. He wanted me to research (with only the Bible lol no internet help on the mountain) and be very creative and artistic about how to put these verses into a notebook he gave me (he also gave me a bow the last week because I kept asking for a machete which was low key the best thing ever cause I actually knew how to use a bow and I played with it a lot). If you know me at all, you know how much I love research and how much I love word art! It was the best week ever. My team worked hard finishing all the meticulous construction projects we had been doing. We finished the road work (had to keep redoing it because the rain would wash out everything that we did), and next, we worked on picking up slash (that one’s for you Dad) from all the nine trees that were cut to clear more land. We went to the village to carry a million (might be an exaggeration) bricks for Dar Para Dar to build a house for a very beautiful family. We painted the cabin and leveled the ground for the overlooking terrace that is to be built soon. And we had so much help doing all this work. Two mission teams and other random people came up to the mountain to hang out with us, work with us, and experience God in the most extraordinary ways. I was able to work on researching mountains and doing all my word art because of everyone’s willingness to give every effort and wring it all out the last week we had in this incredible place, which became a sweet oasis for me and my team.
A week before my ministry host gave me the mountain assignment, the Lord had brought me to a place of asking Him why this mountain was so important and why I was here. I was in a place of lacking purpose, and finding a lot of frustration through all the tasks we were doing and just annoyed at the spiritual warfare that was following me. The first verse about mountains that the Lord led me to was Micah 4:1-2 ‘“… the mountain of the LORD’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths…’” Through the assignment of looking at all the verses I could find in the Bible about mountains, the Lord was quickly changing my heart for this mountain. He was gracious, teaching me the importance of coming to the high place to seek Him, the gift that it was to have no distractions, and to just be still in His natural temple. He helped me die to self as He broke down my spiritual pride and led me toward complete selflessness. He awoke and built up in my heart an awe, reverence, and wonder. He put me in a place where I had to rely on Him for every comfort and every need, a place where He met me in intimate ways. I’m at a deeper level of dependency and trust in Him because of this experience and also with my team. I had to rely on the girls on my team and that was a hard lesson to learn, but I’m so thankful for it because I love them and they have my back and I can truly trust that!
The last few days, I was actually sad to leave the mountain because I found a new facet of my Forever Love (my Lord) on this mountain, a new picture of Him; clear, beautiful, and absolutely extraordinary in every way. I was honestly really nervous about not being able to have this kind of time with God in the other countries that I’m going to. It’s true I most likely won’t have a mountain or a host that cares more about my time with God than the work we are doing for him. But the Lord had gifted me with the revelation that we have the ability to carry our mountain wherever we go. Jesus died on the cross so that our sins would be forgiven and no matter where we are we can commune with God. Our feet are always on the summit to meet Him, learn from Him, and seek His guidance. All we have to do is be willing to lay down all the directions, and seek Him with all our hearts. We can find Him anywhere and our imagination is so powerful that our secret place with God is only a breath and an eye shut away. This was just the beginning of the Lord moving and working and doing miraculous things in and through me. He is here and present every step of the way and the mountain will always be in my heart, both the hardness of the experience and the joy, growth, trust, and peace that become my heart at the end of it.
I feel more trusting of God and my team, I feel stronger, and more able to go and do ministry. The Lord blessed me with time and taught me to be a Mary these few months, turning the strong focus I had on being a Martha (Luke 10). I’m honestly ready and excited about what’s next because there is so much more to engage in and learn. I am still ascending, still learning to die to self, to take up my cross, and follow Christ with my whole heart. I’m still learning what it means to be a daughter of the Most High God, no longer an orphan but made complete in the image of God. I’m still learning what it means to fall into God’s original design for all of the world. I am still ascending and I will be for the rest of my life, I’m just choosing to recognize this time as a pivotal moment in my life. That has changed the way I do life with my Eternal Love (God) and with other people. So here’s to just the beginning of my song and in all the valleys of darkness I face, I will always sing my song of ascent (Micah 7:7-8; Psalms 23; Psalms 120).
See my website for pictures: https://www.rael-mission.com/
