*Due to security reasons, we will not mention names of the families or locations that we served in on this trip.*

The trip to Pakistan with a small team from our faith family was one that has been in the works for the past two years! Here’s a little backstory: We have two families in Pakistan that are global partners. One came through a familial connection in our church; the other came through a connection on a past trip our church took to the Netherlands two years ago. On that Netherlands trip, we met another family working in Pakistan. When we found out they knew and worked on the same bigger team as the other family we support, we were amazed by the connection God was making!

From that time, we started dreaming about what it would look like for us to bring a team over to work with both families. A couple of weeks ago, the Lord brought that dream to life as we spent the week serving alongside both of these families in Pakistan! We are praising the Lord for working out the details to bring together this team that went and served alongside the global partners that our faith family supports at just the right time.

Our time in Pakistan was short, but full! We stayed on a college campus where one of the families lives and works on staff. We spent our mornings all together at this family’s home. We would eat breakfast, worship, and walk through a devotional together. Then, one of the global partners led us through times of training on their approach to ministry in Pakistan and the bigger picture vision of God’s work in Pakistan.

Our team was humbled as we learned, realizing just how little we knew about the history of Pakistan, Christianity in Pakistan, and working with people from a Muslim background. One of the most surprising things we learned was that there are around 2 million Christians in Pakistan! There is an interesting history regarding Christianity in Pakistan (that I don’t have time to share here, but if you’re interested, I encourage you to do some research!). Praise the Lord for the ways He’s already been working in Pakistan to establish His church!

We also learned helpful information to understand that, just as Christians have a variety of denominations and areas of differing views, so do Muslims. It is not a monolithic thing, but varies from person to person. As a part of our learning, we got to visit a very popular Muslim shrine where people go to pray in hopes that their prayers will be more effective. It was spiritually heavy to walk on the marble-tiled floor of this historic shrine and see the physical beauty contrasted with the tangible despair etched on the faces of those visiting in desperation to have their prayers answered. For Muslims all over the world, it is valuable to seek to understand their worldview and what they personally believe rather than assuming based on religious rules.

In the afternoons and evenings, we were able to go and serve in a variety of ways. One day we spent time with a local Pakistani couple in a village near the big city. This couple is sold out for the gospel. As they sought God’s plans for them, they felt prompted to move to this village a few years ago and open a school as a way to minister and share Christ’s love in this village. Through this school, the Lord is using them to be a beacon of hope and the gospel truth in this village that faces many physical challenges as well as great spiritual darkness. We were happily surprised when they showed us discipling material that they use from Operation Christmas Child after handing out shoeboxes each year! That was a neat moment to make the connection between the shoeboxes our faith family gives and see how they are being used in Pakistan to reach this village! While we were visiting, we were also able to visit the families of some of their students and spend time with them and pray over their physical and spiritual needs. It felt like we were experiencing the gospels and Acts brought to life!

Another highlight of our time there was getting to help lead a youth night of worship for 400 teenagers in conjunction with a local Christian school! These teenagers all came from a Christian home, but not all had personal relationships with Christ. During this night of worship, we gathered in a beautiful tent in the middle of a neighborhood to worship the Lord and proclaim the gospel. As Nate was preaching the gospel on stage, the Muslim call to prayer went off. It was a haunting reminder of the lostness in Pakistan and the need for believers to lovingly and boldly proclaim the truth about Christ. We pray that the Lord will water the seeds planted in the hearts of all who heard the gospel that evening!

The rest of our time was spent meeting locals in a park and having spiritual conversations, learning how to play cricket, sharing testimony in a Christian studies class with teenagers, going on a scavenger hunt in a local market, and spending time with three Muslim boys that our global partners have been building a relationship with for the past three years. Each of these experiences was unique and provided opportunities for our team to have conversations about Christ and point believers and those who are not yet believers to the beauty and reality of Jesus.

One final aspect of our trip that was just as important as the serving opportunities was the time we got to spend loving on and caring for the global partners there in Pakistan. It is a hard place to live and work. They are far from their families back in the US. They struggle to secure visas to live there legitimately. They are constantly facing challenges to simply live their lives there, much less to do ministry. The time we got to spend listening to their stories, learning from them, and encouraging one another in Christ was invaluable. Many tears were shed on their part expressing their gratitude for our team spending the time and money to come and walk alongside them for a week and share in the burden for people of Pakistan to come to know Christ.

Thank you, faith family, for praying over the team that went to Pakistan and for the gospel opportunities while there. I encourage you–right now–to stop and pray for the global partners living and working in Pakistan. Pray that the Lord will encourage them and help them not grow weary of doing good (1 Cor. 15:58). Pray also for the over 240 million people in Pakistan who do not yet know Jesus Christ as Lord. May the Lord send more laborers into the harvest there (Luke 10:2)!