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How a kingdom journey changes you

How does a kingdom journey change you? Here’s a post by my future son-in-law, Joe Bunting. In it he references his experience on the World Race. Lately, Seth has been talking about this concept called kingdom journey.  For me, it’s not a concept at all.  For eleven months, it was my l…
By Seth Barnes

How does a kingdom journey change you? Here’s a post by my future son-in-law, Joe Bunting. In it he references his experience on the World Race.

Lately, Seth has been talking about this concept called kingdom journey.  For me, it’s not a concept at all.  For eleven months, it was my life.  And the biggest challenge I had ever faced.

Kingdom journey was the mornings I would wake up in Romania in panic because we were going out to do evangelism to Romanian strangers who didn’t speak English.

Kingdom journey was the afternoons in Thailand when, every few seconds, I would check to see how much farther the sun had to travel before it sank behind the Thai hills, signaling the end of another day of bone breaking construction.

Kingdom journey was sitting on the ground at a train station in Croatia amid fourteen backpacks.  It was not knowing where we would sleep that night or the next twenty nights.  We were dropped off at a train platform and left to figure it out.

Just after our second month, my team and I were in Budapest.  We didn’t have enough money for the hostels and night was beginning to fall.  Spending the night on the street was becoming a very real possibility.

“Where are we supposed to go?” Tamica Sloan, our team leader, asked. Then Stacy Povian and Heather Reed came back from prayer walking through the streets of Budapest, asking God for a place to stay.  They stumbled into a place renting out luxury apartments.  Miraculously, it was within our tiny budget. On top of that, when they saw how many people we had, they gave us a second apartment for free.  That night, I slept in my own room for the first and last time of the trip.

It was one of the highest spiritual moments of my kingdom journey.  I knew intellectually that God was my father, but had never experienced the reality of his fathering as I did that night.  

My kingdom journey was the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced.  God taught me how to depend on him at a level I had never understood before.  It changed everything: my work, my relationships, how I make decisions. I’m so glad I went.

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