While on a Passport trip to Mongolia, Morgan Blair and her team spent a day without a plan for ministry. Instead, they made it a treasure hunt, by asking God to show them attributes and pictures of people to meet.

But when they headed out on the streets of Ulaanbaatar, they found so much more than they expected.

I have never been so excited for something I don’t understand, was the only thought swimming through my mind as my team ran into an overly enthusiastic Mongolian couple yesterday. They spoke no English and yet were overjoyed to see a bunch of Americans on their home street.

Yesterday our team leader, Emma, felt the Lord place on her heart to go on a treasure hunt. What a treasure hunt entails is that we pray for God to show us people who we are supposed to encounter that day. We can ask for attributes, like a red shirt or blue glasses, or needs, like back pain or grief.

Then we pray for a location or a name or whatever else the Lord feels is necessary for us to find or minister to this specific person.

When our team prayed, we saw and heard very specific needs and attributes. One girl saw a man with a dragon tattoo who had depression. Another girl saw a flower shop with a woman in a red dress who had back pain.

We left church with expectant hearts, each with a list in hand of things the Lord had placed on our hearts during our morning prayers, and ready for big things to be thrown in our paths.

Because if there is anything that we have learned from the past two weeks in Ulaanbaatar, it is that we should be prepared for anything.

Since we don’t understand Mongolian and barely anyone here speaks English, our days have been nothing short of unpredictable. We might set out in the morning planning to venture over to the square in the center of the city to pray over people and then all the sudden we are on a bus towards the countryside preparing to watch little eight-year-old boys race horses through the mountains.

Expect nothing, hope for everything has been the mindset I have learned to live from while doing ministry here in Mongolia.

God shows up even if we are completely unaware of what the plans for the next day or even the next hour holds.

We hadn’t even gotten to the main road yet when we were stopped by a Mongolian couple who were smiling, cheering, and shoving Mongolian chocolates in our faces.

“America! America! Our son, healed 100%! 100%! Halleluiah! Jesus!” they said.

The words we were able to understand from the couple were sporadic, fragmented in English, and few, but as I looked around at our team each one of us were smiling, laughing, and tearing up.

“I don’t know what is happening but it must be good!” a teammate said.

Then we saw a woman from the church and our translator, Khoso, heading towards us. We all motioned for her to hurry, so Khoso ran over and started speaking with the couple.

Within a few minutes we were all cheering, crying, hugging, high fiving, and even sniffing one another (the Mongolian equivalent of kissing of the cheek).

Because it turns out this couple’s daughter had a son who was 3 months old and had a heart condition. An American had helped their family find the Indian doctor from the States who performed heart surgery to heal the baby. They had just gotten the call at 9am that morning that the surgery was 100% successful and now they were going around the city praising the Lord, sharing the news, and handing out candy to everyone they ran into.

The couple was especially excited that we were American, and that Emma, our leader, had the same hair as the Americans who helped them. The whole encounter lasted a good half hour after which we were all high on God’s healing power and love, and super pumped because we had been invited to the couple’s house in the countryside.

After the beautiful encounter with the couple’s testimony of healing, we continued on our treasure hunt where both of my teammates found exactly who God had placed on their hearts that morning: a man with a dragon tattoo who, when approached by Anna, admitted to having depression, was open to a prayer of healing, and even came over to the church that evening to hang out with the team and participate in open mic night.

Then there was a woman in a flower shop who was wearing a red dress.

“Do you, by any chance, have back pain?” Anna asked her. The woman in the red dress nodded. Then, Anna and her stared at each other wide-eyed and open-mouthed for a few moments out of utter shock.

“Can I pray for you?” Anna asked once she had regained her words. The woman nodded again and a prayer of healing filled the small flower shop.

Afterwards, all ten of us and Khoso started filing out of the small room, but I made a point to move slowly. I wanted to be the last one out because I wanted to study the facial expression of the woman in the red dress as we started to leave.

When it was only me left in the shop she slipped into the back corner and looked over at me with tears falling down her cheeks. I smiled, waved, and then slipped out the door.

I have never seen God show up and deliver needs in such blatant ways before. So in this country where the language barrier was thought by our team to be a hindrance, we went back to the church that evening thanking God for bringing excitement to places our English, goal oriented minds couldn’t understand.

*First photo by Amberly Vincent

 You can join other college students like Morgan Spring 2017 on 3 month trips to Latin America, Africa, and Asia! CLICK HERE to find out how you can join a team—and where you can GO!