LA trip - City of Angels

Hey everyone, wow, it's been a while since we last updated this blog, it has been pretty pretty busy since we came back to Redding from Christmas break, but the main thing is, we're back!!

So I want to share a bit about a recent ministry trip to LA I went to with one of our pastors, Sarah Webster, and a few other amazing students. It was so much fun, such a encouraging time in so many ways, as a friend of mine says, you cannot have an encounter with God's love and not change, something changes in our awareness of who He is and of how he loves us when we encounter Him, and that awareness always allows us to see ourselves as He sees us, which allows us to see others as He sees them and love them deeper than we could've done before. It's an amazing cycle of love haha, but truth is, you cannot be the same after an encounter with His love.

On the way down to LA we were sitting in the car sharing about our hearts and expectations for this trip, normally signs and wonders, healings and miracles are the top 'this is what I want to see' thing, which is awesome, and indeed we saw a lot of that taking place, and more important, we saw God being introduced to many as a result of a encounter people had with His goodness and love through healings and miracles. I love when miracles happen, it's a beautiful thing, but the miracles in itself are never my end goal, miracles are always a doorway to an encounter with a good God, it allows people to experience a God that not only cares and loves them, but also a God powerful enough to change their circumstances.

On this trip though, as we shared our hearts, we started to realize that the team's heart was to love people, to make sure that everyone that we met would leave feeling known, feeling seen and heard, yes we wanted to see the supernatural taking place but what is more supernatural than to see a broken heart been restored right in front of you right?! It's a beautiful miracle. We asked God for salvation and love encounters, and God heard our prayers.

We got to LA just before 5pm, and our plan for that evening was to visit the 'Bonnie Brae House', this is the place where the Azusa Street Revival started, the home of William J. Seymour, the Azusa Revival preacher, a exciting place with a lot of history. Once we got there the woman who was meant to open the place for us called to tell us that she would be a hour and a half late, it was cold, we were hungry and tired from our 10hrs journey, and now we had 2 hours to wait, standing in front of this house downtown LA, YAY!! 
As we waited, a bunch of us standing on the footpath, people started to feel drawn to us, this man who lives across the street heard us singing (yes, 2 hours to kill, we decided to start worshiping on the street, why not?), this man came to us asking what was so special about that house, he said that he sees people there all the time to visit it, sometimes groups of people, why? What was so important and special about that place? So we started to share that over 100 years ago people were praying in that place everyday and God answered their prayers, the Holy Spirit came and they were filled with the Spirit of God and that started a great move of God that affected the whole world. This man looked at us and after a long pause he started to share how his mom was killed 18 years ago, and he always blamed God for it, and he never wanted anything to do with God, but then he started to say that on that night he felt to come talk to us, and that he thinks that it was time to reconnect with God again, BOOM!! Just like that, we asked if we could pray for him and he said yes but he had to do something before we start praying. He went to his house and 10mins later came back out with his whole family, wife and 2 teenage boys, and told us that his whole family were ready to accept Jesus in their life. A few of us prayed for him and he was filled with the Spirit right there and then, so good. This guy and his family ended up going into the house with us and learned more about our history as Christians.

While this was happening, some of our team were talking to other people that kept stopping and asking what we were doing, even this woman who was driving by felt to turn around, get out of the car and come talk to us, she also got saved and ended up in the house with us haha. People stopped and asked for prayer for different things and we saw healings taking place. People got saved, healed and delivered on that night and we didn't do anything for it, we didn't approach anyone, we were just standing at the front of this house talking and at some stage worshiping God. People came to be loved, known, heard and seen, and we did just that. The result of our prayers earlier in the car were just the beginning of a amazing week.

The next day we went to Venice Beach, if you haven't heard of this place just look it up on google, this is a super famous beach in the LA area with a lot of everything in it, cool people, famous people, crazy people, homeless, drug addicts, street artists, vendors and some more, you wouldn't get bored here. Our heart going there was the same, meet people and make sure that everyone would feel known, heard, seen and loved. We split our team into smaller groups and went off to do whatever we felt God leading us to. I ended up with two other girls and as we started walking we saw a group of men and women standing by a wall, they looked rather scary and I was a bit concerned about approaching them to be honest, one of the girls with me wasn't at all so before I had the chance to express my concerns, she jumped right in the middle of the circle introducing herself and pointing to me, and so the adventure begins. We ended up talking and listening to these guys stories for over a hour, all of them have been to jail a few times each, and stayed there up to 9 years at a time, lovely people as you can imagine. But as we started to ask them deeper questions about their lives and what caused them to end up at such places, these guys came alive, they couldn't believe that we were actually interested in their stories, they loved sharing all the good and bad stuff they did. I then started to ask for advice on how to stay away from jail, why not? And the life advice these guys were giving me on making good decisions in life and think through my actions were priceless, really deep good stuff. We could see the gold inside of every one of those guys and they could see that we really cared. We got to pray for every single one of these guys individually before we left and again, God showed up. On that day more people felt known and seen by us and by God, people got healed and saved. There are many other stories like this one that took place on that day but that could be saved for another time. And this was only day 2.

The rest of the trip stayed on the same course, everyday, everywhere we went we released the power of love and watched as God restored people's violations of what love is. We went to places like Skid Row, Pasadena, spoke at churches, ministered to people, prophesied at the Dream Centre - LA for over 3 hours over their youth and a few other things. Everywhere we went we went with the same heart, to make sure people were feeling Known and seen by us and by a good God who cares.

As I said before, it was an amazing trip. For me personally, one of the amazing things I got out of this trip was the realization of what I carry. My heart was to spend time with people and make sure they felt known, this is what I had to give, it is what I wanted to give away, and in the midst of so many amazing gifted people in our team, it was a great experience to run with what I had to give and be aware of what I had to release into every environment and situation I walked in. I believe that I was more activated into what God has for me to carry in life and I became more aware of what 'my message' to the world is.

Wow, this post is quite a bit longer that I expected so, I might finish it up here for now.

I hope you guys have enjoyed reading about this trip and that this would somehow bless you guys. Our mission trip to Colombia is coming soon so, be ready for some more life changing stories. Thank you for everyone so has giving to our upcoming mission trip to Colombia, we are almost there with our payments, and if you would like to support us just follow the link bellow:

https://missiontrips.ibethel.org/

Thank you all for all the love, prayers and support to both Christine and I.

Love you all!!

Daniel Oliveira