Today I am on my way to the airport, getting on a plane direct to Abuja then I’ll be taking a 4hr drive north to Jos. So by the early hours of tomorrow morning I should be pottering around under the sub-Saharan skies!

If you get a minute between 10pm tonight and 7am(ish) tomorrow morning please could you be praying for some of the following:

(And if you’re not the praying type I’d still value your thoughts and wishes)

Travel

– Safety in flying
– Finding my way through the airport
– Collecting my visa
– Safety through check-points on the road to Jos

Health

– By now I will be well dosed up on Anti-Malerials, please pray that my body would adjust to them well.
– Please pray for my general health, that I’d keep hydrated and topped up on suncream!

– Please also pray for my spiritual health

Imagine if God appeared to you via express Angel and called out to you ‘Hey there Mighty Warrior!’ would you double take? would you look behind you to check there wasn’t someone behind you? … I think I’d probably laugh and say ‘Who? Me?’ …

That’s exactly what happened to Gideon in the Bible. The angel of the Lord comes down and does exactly that, ‘Sup Mighty Warrior, God’s got work for you to do.’ I love to imagine that Gideon did a double take and turned to look behind him…before replying ‘Who? Me? Are you kidding? Right Now I’m hiding so I don’t get killed, I’m the youngest and most unimportant person in my family and you’re calling me Mighty Warrior??!!’ (check out the full story in Judges 6)

God has a fantastic habit of using the most unlikely people to do extraordinary things. If you look at all of the ‘great’ types in the Bible – Moses (he had a speech issue), Elijah (got depressed), Noah (had a drink issue), Peter (denied he even knew Jesus), they all had huge flaws but God used them to do phenomenal things.

It’s so encouraging to know that we don’t have to be perfect to receive God’s blessings, we just have to be willing..

So it’s a week on Thursday that I head to Heathrow, check in my bags and sit in the departure lounge where I predict my normal pre-mission panic!

Right now I feel a little like David, you know the little dude from David and Goliath, I’m stood before the King wearing armour five sizes too big the only audible sound being a *gulp* and the thought – Am I really doing this?! Then I suddenly remember it’s not the armour of an ancient King that is shielding me, but the armour of my creator God and then all I want to say is – bring it on!

Mission can seem like such a giant thing – in reality, it’s just saying ‘yes’ to hanging out with God and to letting him take the wheel of our life. It’s being around and letting God use you in extraordinary ways whilst taking people along with you on the journey.

So – ‘Sup! Mighty Warrior… yes you! God’s got a job for you – He wants to hang out, give you some ideas, plans and dreams and He wants you to share them with the World so that His glory can be seen through your extraordinary life.’

Mission Africa

My Justgiving Page

Hope MK

I love to sing. In the summer I wind down the windows of the car, open the sun roof and belt out some tunes, for a brief journey of time I am in the zone! I don’t care who can see or hear me because as far as I’m concerned I’m in my car, my own little bubble, the sun is shining and the world requires a soundtrack. Anyone I pass must see me and think I’m a complete lunatic, but I just don’t care.

I believe that there’s something very special about music. It can be a powerful tool, I’ve seen people transformed through it. The shyest student at college becomes a completely different person, someone without the ability to speak can suddenly express themselves in dance, music is such a special thing. That’s why I love to sing, it has the power to transport you to different places.

I also love to worship through singing. But what’s the difference? Singing is for us, Worship is for God. Worship is when you take the music and notes and words and wholeheartedly give them back to God. For me it’s being transported into that place where you just don’t care, you lose track of everything around you and suddenly it’s just you and God. You forget about you and it’s all about Him.

We have a worship team at church. One thing I’ve noticed when being a part of the leading on a Sunday morning is that you kind of have to tune your heart. Like the strings of a guitar the heart needs to be set right for you to worship. Anyone can sing the words on the screen. But how can we actually connect and mean them? We tune our hearts, we pray, we quiet ourselves before God then we worship with our heart.

But worship isn’t limited to using our vocal chords! Worship should be our lives. When we ask Jesus into our hearts and offer what we have to his service our whole life becomes Worship. It becomes something offered purely to Him. When we tune our lives to God awesome things happen.

You see God is a God of Worship. Anyone can mouth the words on the screen of life but how many of us can say we actually mean them?

My challenge to you is this: commit yourself to worship wholeheartedly. Take some time to quiet your heart before God and ask Him what He wants you to do next? Don’t be afraid to dream big, Gods not in the habit of making things boring!

Keep your ears open.

I have tinnitus. For the ear savvy among you you’ll know that means I hear noise when things are silent. For me tinnitus is a high pitched constant tone that used to drive me to distraction. What frustrated me most is it was inescapable. I couldn’t close my ears, avoid the sound or run away from it. The ironic thing is that tinnitus is often stress related, so the more frustrated I got the more noticeable the sound became, which increased my frustration, which in turn increased the sound… I have to admit at times I thought I was going mad.

Everywhere I turned nobody had any answers, I was told to ‘google’ my symptoms, don’t! Googling symptoms always leads to the worst conclusions! I went for an MRI scan, saw doctors who told me nothing could be done and could offer no explanation. I needed a specialist but it took me to push and push for someone to refer me, until finally I rang an audiology department at the local hospital and said I needed to see someone!

Enter Doctor Robinson, Audiologist and superhero extraordinaire.

Have you ever experienced that moment when you connect on a level with someone and you realise suddenly ‘finally, someone gets me!’ For me this normally happens when I meet someone I have loads in common with. But in this instance it was a doctor who had time and was prepared not to just dismiss me.

I was so relieved when she didn’t just send me away, when she offered a possible solution I could have cried! The solution involved a hearing aid, waiting a month for that hearing aid, and then giving things time to change.

Part of me didn’t relish the thought of going another month with ringing in my ears, another part of me was stupidly self conscious about the hearing aid I would have to wear. I wanted an instantaneous solution but this was going to take time.

A month later I went back to the audiologist to get my hearing aid fitted and the levels checked, it was so strange at first. Everything felt so loud, so clear. I hadn’t realised how much stress my head had been under just trying to compensate for my hearing and the added pressure of trying to concentrate, added to the frustration of asking people to repeat things constantly. The difference was amazing.

Looking back the whole experience has taught me something. We are so deaf in life sometimes. Not physically, but spiritually deaf. We fill ourselves with so much ‘noise’ that distracts us from hearing properly. We spend so much time filling ourselves with the world, technology, distractions that we damage our hearing from God. It’s so easy to find a million other instantly gratifying things to do than to risk sitting with God for a while and actually hearing him.

It’s only when we go to God the specialist and lay the distractions before him that we realise how deaf we’ve been. Only when we put our iPads, iPods, iPhones down and put our ISelves into Gods presence that we can hear clearly. He’s our specialist, He created us, he won’t dismiss us or send us away, He has time for you. Use it.

Today’s challenge: Have a technology free hour, get back to basics with God and just listen.

You are beautiful.

Three little words that can be so empowering if we just allowed ourselves to believe them. At MKSummerCamp ’14 we talked a lot about identity and being the real us and we found it easy to identify negatives about ourselves, but more encouragingly we wrote down a good few positives. We looked at the weight we give to the negatives and thought about how we could give our positives the power rather than so readily believing the negatives people give us.

I have a challenge for you. Believe you are beautiful.

Our social groups and the media constantly bombard us with the way we should look, what to wear, what to look like, we’re constantly told we are too fat, too thin, too pale, too tanned, too tall, too small….. Stop it!

There was a recent movement on Social media sites that asked women to go ‘bare faced’ in support of a cancer charity, to raise awareness. In honesty the amount of women who looked perfectly beautiful without any make up on was great, what wasn’t so great was the fact they couldn’t see they were beautiful. It made me question, why do people feel the need to cover up before they leave the house? When did it become bare faced cheek to walk out of the house without make up on.

I’m not a big wearer of make up so I guess you could call me out and say ‘easier said than done Claire, you don’t understand.’ But a few weeks ago I went into the body shop with a friend and got a mini make over. The lady was lovely but sitting ‘bare faced’ in that chair I felt completely inadequate. Everyone around me had make up on and looked beautiful and there I was sat in a chair make up being troweled on my face to accentuate my features. Not five minutes earlier I hadn’t cared what my face looked like and within minutes I felt self conscious and ugly. Then as she put make up on me and told me how amazing my new look was I bought into the pitch. I believed it so much that I left with a bag full of goodies. The following week I got up a smidge earlier everyday to put on my face and get to work, a week ago I hadn’t cared and within a week I didn’t want to leave the house with a bare face. Self image had gotten under my skin.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with wearing make up, I just think if you’ve got to the point where you can’t leave the house without it then you’ve forgotten how naturally beautiful you are.

Today’s challenge: I want to challenge you to brave your beauty. Go bare faced, not for charity, but to embrace that you are made in the image if God, you are beautiful. Believe it.

I now know my leaving date! It’s a little later than originally planned but that’s worked perfectly 🙂 I will leave the uk on 18th September 2014! 🙂

Hi everyone!

Here’s the first of my Nigeria newsletters! I’m not there yet, but this one is just a little about the preparation side of things 🙂

July 2014 – Nigeria vi Belfast

Love! xx

Since I last posted the response from you guys has be phenomenal! God has provided so abundantly that a few times I have had to stop myself and smile, thank God and tell myself ‘Claire, you’re so blessed! You don’t deserve this!’ It’s such a mark of God’s love in our lives, we ask Him to provide, He hears us and provides beyond what we could even imagine.

I can happily say that I am just £300 short of my £3000 target! *phew*! I get a little emotional just thinking about it all!

Funds have flooded in from the High Tea Event, the cards that my lovely friend Ali made and from gifts.  I am so thankful for you all and love how you have caught the vision and jumped in!

My last post was advertising the high-tea event which went amazingly! Everything was gorgeous and lots of people turned up to sample posh tea and cakes and to hear the story so far. 

Last week I went to Belfast for three days training with Mission-Africa. It was an intense few days of Cultural and Safety training and looking at the location that I will be working in. It was hard going, but I’ve come back even more pumped to get started! As a result of my training I have a lot of work to do, preparing physically and spiritually. 

I’ll be working at Open Doors School which looks fantastic! 

All of you who are the praying kind please remember me in your prayers! I would love prayer for the run up to the trip please, I’m leaving the first week in September but I really need to be ready, built up spiritually and ready and raring to go. Pray that God will prepare my heart and mind for the things I will see and do and the people who will change my life forever.

That’s all for now lovelies! 

Again! Thank you SO much for your amazingness! Be blessed!

You’ll have seen and heard about the recent troubles in Nigeria, the stories that hit news headlines recently have made such an impact both online and off, in all the negativity that has hit the country it’s so easy to miss the positive progress that is being made there. Continue reading →