MID WEEK MOTIVATION - October 29, 2025 (Addy Ellenburg)

You're listening to the Midweek Motivation Podcast from Desotto Hills Baptist Church in South Haven, Mississippi.

Here's your host, Mark Lewis, David Burgess, Laura Ulrich, and Pastor Grant Diegel.

Welcome to the Midweek Motivation Podcast for Wednesday, October the 29th, 2025.

I certainly hope that you are doing well.

We are swamped here at DeSota Hills as we continue to work to clean up Fall Festival, which was amazing.

Also wanted you to be in prayer for Grant as he heads back from the convention today.

It's been crazy around here, and so we don't have a traditional podcast this morning, but I did want to recast a conversation that one of our members, Addie Ellenberg, had back in the summer.

She is a passionate student who is uh really excited about missions and everything that's been going on in her life in college.

I said student, I guess I should say young adult, because she is all grown up now.

But she has been uh doing lots of different things on the mission field, and she came to share to our church back in the early summer some of what's going on in her life, and I just wanted you guys to catch that conversation in case you might have missed it back in May.

Hi, like you said, my name's Addy, and I grew up going here.

Um my parents started bringing me here when I was about two, and so I grew up in this church, and I think a lot of the reason I kind of am where I am today is because of all that this church has done for me.

And so I kind of want to get into missions and all of that and what I'm doing this summer, but I kind of want to talk about how I got there, and so I'm gonna start a little bit with kind of my testimony.

And so I came to know the Lord at eight years old, actually at this church, and so I remember going to talk to Brother Mar no, Brother James, yep, thank you.

You finished that for me.

It gets confusing, there's a lot of Lewis's, it's fine.

Um, so I remember going to talk to Brother James and um just telling him that I wanted to get baptized, I wanted to believe in the Lord, and so I did.

And obviously, as eight, you know, you don't really know what that all means.

And so life has definitely taught me a lot about what it means to follow Christ along the way.

And I think I've grown a lot in my relationship with God since I was eight years old.

And so that led me to being a senior in high school here in the youth group and getting to go on a trip to Costa Rica, which there's pictures somewhere.

I have a bunch of pictures of all the mission trips I've been on.

Yeah, there we go.

That they're just gonna be circulating.

So there's some in there from Costa Rica, and I got to go with a group.

Some of y'all are here in this room that I got to go with.

And so that was my first introduction to like ever talking about God, like with anybody before, really.

I had never like actually shared, like, okay, this is what I believe.

And I had definitely never gone up to a stranger before and tried to tell them about that.

And so that was the first time.

And I remember everybody in the trip was really encouraging and was really like, you know, you're 17 and you're out here doing this, and like we're really proud of you.

And so that meant a lot to me.

Yep, there we are.

Um, and so it was the first time I ever got to see like that much brokenness, and also a lot of people who did believe in Jesus and had so much faith that like he was gonna, you know, restore them someday out of really, really bad circumstances.

And so it taught me a lot, and it really started to grow my heart for mission work.

And so then I got to college and I immediately knew that like my faith was something I really, really wanted to take seriously in college because they kind of tell you college either makes or breaks your faith, and I really wanted it to make it.

And so I remember talking with my roommate Kylie, and we were like, we're gonna be really serious about our relationship with God while we're in college.

And so me and her got plugged into the Baptist Collegiate ministry that's on campus.

It's the BSU in Mississippi, but I go to school in Arkansas, so it's the BCM.

But we got really, really plugged in, and immediately I just started growing in my faith in ways that I would have never imagined.

And so I learned how to read my Bible, I learned how to pray, as crazy as that sounds.

Um, and so it really taught me a lot about hey, you're getting to adulthood, you're getting to be, you know, more independent, you're gonna have to really learn how to lean on God.

And so it also taught me a lot about missions and it gave me a lot of opportunities.

So I've been in college for three years.

I just finished my junior year up, and I've gone on four mission trips in those three years, um, thanks to the BCM.

And so my freshman year, I went to Panama City Beach, which I don't think I have any pictures of, but which you might be thinking Panama City Beach for spring break is just a vacation, and it was fun, but it was also a really good mission field.

Um, I'm a college student, and there were a lot of college students down there that go down there to not do mission work, that go down there to party and drink a lot.

And so it was actually one of the weirdest experiences I've ever had.

Our mission work was from 9 p.m.

to 3 a.m.

And so we went and we stood in the lines at bars with these people, and we walked all the way up to the front of the bar, and then we were like, okay, bye, I'll see you later, and then walked back and got in the back of the line and found someone else to talk to.

But we basically would just stand there and try to talk to them about Jesus for as long as possible.

A lot of the times maybe they weren't really into it, but we just kept talking to them and kept bothering them.

And so that was the first trip, I think, where I really learned that being a good person and being a good Christian isn't gonna bring people to Christ.

If I live a good enough life, that's not gonna have people coming up to me and asking me what's different about me.

We have to go, we have to interrupt people.

We have to say, hey, I'm gonna tell you about Jesus, even if, you know, you would have never come up and asked me about Jesus.

I'm gonna interrupt your life and I'm gonna tell you about him because I care about you.

And so that was the first opportunity I ever really saw that happening, and I was like, okay, this is different.

This is kind of scary because these people are my age, and I know that they're probably thinking I'm crazy and they just want to get into the bar.

But I'm like, hey, do you know Jesus?

And it was really, really cool.

And so the next year, my sophomore year, I went to Chicago, um, which was really, really interesting because I had never been, and I got to kind of see how life is like there, and it's very different, but it taught me a lot about missions and about reaching people who were immigrants, which is what we mostly dealt with, um, were people who had immigrated to the U.S.

because Chicago is a safe haven city.

And so it was very different work.

A lot of it was meeting physical needs and also just giving people hope that like their circumstances, you know, might not be okay, but like Jesus is still good and he's still gonna take care of them.

And then that led me to giving up my summer last year.

So about a year ago, I went to Washington, D.C.

and I served for two months.

I'm part of a group called Gin Send, um, which actually our church gives to the Annie Armstrong Easter offering, which I didn't know, but that's what helped me to go to Gin Send last year and do DC.

And so I have on my shirt Feel by Annie to remind me of that.

But this year, getting to see like my own home church giving to the offering that helped me to go last summer really, really touched my heart.

And so that was really impactful for me.

But last summer I worked with interns, and so every year, thousands and thousands of interns come to Washington, DC to work in politics every summer.

And some of those interns are gonna move back and work there for the rest of their lives, some of them are gonna go home.

But my group's job was to find those interns and to interrupt their days and tell them about Jesus.

And if they knew about Jesus, we would get them plugged into a church because a lot of them are up there for a few months at a time and they're not at home, and so it can get easy to kind of fall out of that rhythm of going to church.

And so that taught me a lot about college ministry and working for ministry for two months, which is kind of a long time.

Um, and so yeah, I got back from that trip and I think I was like, I'm done next summer.

I'm going to do my own thing.

I'm gonna work a job, I'm gonna go home because this is my last summer before I graduate college.

So I think I was ready to just spend it all at home, spend it all with my family, and definitely was not going to go on missions again.

And then this spring break, I went to New York on a mission trip, and it was life-changing.

Um, I had been to New York before, but it was not the same experience at all.

We went up there in a group, about 40 of us from the BCM, and we worked with North African Muslims.

And so if you know anything about Islam or Muslims, um, they are very peaceful people, but they are very um, they're full of faith in Islam.

They are very like, I'm gonna stick to this.

They will argue with you all day long on Islam versus Christianity, and you're basically never gonna win that fight.

And so it was different for sure.

And so it required a lot of courage and strength and boldness to go up to these people.

But I started to realize about day two, day three of this trip that like my heart was really, really broken for these people because they didn't know Jesus.

Um, they have their faith in a human who died, and you know, we have our faith in Jesus who came and died and rose, and they don't know that.

And so um a lot of them believe that they can live a perfect life and then get to paradise is what they call it, and that Allah can still say no.

And so hearing that and hearing these people tell me that, I remember thinking, like, you know, I've known my whole life, you know, until since I was eight that I was gonna go to heaven.

And even though I sin and I mess up, I don't have to doubt that.

And these people, you know, they do all the things they cover themselves, you know, the women cover themselves head to toe and they do all their prayers all day and they don't eat the things they're not supposed to eat, and they do everything right, but they can still get to paradise and Allah can say no to them.

And so, sorry, it makes me emotional.

But um, I remember just meeting these women and hearing their stories and just being like, I don't know how I could live like that of not knowing where I was gonna go if I died today.

And so, oh gosh, I did not think I was gonna get emotional talking about this.

Um, but yeah, and so God really just was pulling at me and pulling at me and pulling at me, and I really was feeling him telling me, like, you have to come back.

Like, I want you back here, you know, your heart's broken for these people.

Like, I need you here.

And so it was the last day of our trip to New York, and I went up to my campus pastor and I was like, Hey, I think God wants me here.

And he was like, I had a feeling you were gonna say that.

And I was like, Cool.

And so he started working on some stuff logistically for me, and I went on about my day, and then he calls me about an hour and a half later, and he was like, You're not gonna believe this, Addy, but a female spot opened up today for you.

And I was like, Oh my gosh, like if it's not God, I don't know what it is.

And so I just really felt then like God really wants me here, and I had peace about it, and you know, I was telling people about it, and I was like, Yes, it's gonna be great.

And so that's kind of how I got where I am today.

That was the very end of March, though, and so you can imagine my stress and my poor parents' stress about hearing, like, okay, I'm leaving in a month and a half to go spend all summer in New York City.

Um, and so as you can imagine, this trip is quite large and mission trips are not cheap.

And so um, I'm going with a team of five other people.

We're all college students, and so um the trip is about 4,000 each, which is a lot of money.

Um, and so me along with all my other teammates, we all have a little bit left to raise, and so um really I just hope that you would pray for us.

We're about 13 days away from leaving, and so um we're all confident and we know that the Lord wants us there, we know that the Lord will provide, but um, just making that happen, helping us to get to that point.

Um, but also if you would just pray that there would be soil in New York that's ready, um that there would be people there who are ready to hear it, ready to talk to us.

Um and then I just want to read a passage that's kind of been the passage that's been my kind of motivation for this trip.

It's out of Acts 4, starting in verse 13.

It says, When they observed the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed and recognized that they had been with Jesus.

And since they saw the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in opposition.

After they ordered them to leave the Sanhedrin, they conferred among themselves, saying, What should we do with these men?

For an obvious sign has been done through them, clear to everyone living in Jerusalem, and we cannot deny it.

But so that this does not spread any further among the people, let's threaten them against speaking to anyone in his name again.

So they called for them and ordered them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus.

And Peter and John answered them, Whether it is right in the sight of God for us to listen to you rather than to God, you decide, for we are unable to stop speaking about what we have heard and seen.

So I just pray that you would pray that over my team, and that you would pray that we would be unable to not talk about Jesus with these people.

Um, and so yeah.

And then, Grant, if you want to come back up.

So, real quick, I didn't ask you a question.

All right, if someone wants to give to help your trip, how would they do that?

Um I guess find me.

Okay.

Uh but also I I could use prayer partners.

So if you're like, I love to pray, which hopefully you love to pray, but if you're like, I would dedicate to receiving text from me or my team with like specific prayer points and names that you can be praying for over the summer.

I could also really use a few people to do that.

Great.

All right, so we're gonna do this.

Um, we want to pray for Addy, um, but I also want to do this.

Uh Scott and Laura, if y'all would come up here too.

Listen, most of you are parents, you you have kids, and and we talk all the time.

Even this morning, I talked about um how God doesn't always call us to the comfort, he calls us to obey and trust him.

And we have to do that when we go on mission trips.

I'm gonna I'm gonna gear up now.

But we also have to pray that with our children, that when God calls them.

Uh, and that's a tough thing too.

So if y'all don't mind coming up here too, we want to pray for y'all as well.

Um, this.

And so uh I invite y'all to um to pray with me, and let's pray for Addie, and let's pray for Scott and Laura as well.

God, you you are amazing.

The way you work out details, the way you work out plans, even before we realize, even before we know, and then we just we have to just trust you and obey you.

And God, I thank you for Addy, God, and I thank you that she is doing that with her life.

I thank you, I thank you that she is seeking you, um, that she is trusting you, that she is following you.

Um God, and and we praise you for that.

God, I praise you for Scott and Laura, and God, and I thank you that uh they are parents who have had Addie at church since she was two.

Um God, they've raised her in a Christian home.

And and God, I pray for them this summer too, because it is it's it's hard on them to sacrifice and and say, God, we trust you.

And so I pray for them as well that you will be their peace and comfort as well.

God, the rest of the details for for Addie's trip, God, for finances, God, for prayer partners, for all of those things.

Um, God, we know you are going to provide that as well.

So we ask you to do that.

We ask you to move and work as only you can.

God, we love you.

We praise you.

Jesus, it's in your wonderful name that we pray.

Amen.

Thanks again for listening.

If you don't have a church home, we'd love to see you here on Sunday mornings.

You can catch our services online at DeSodahills.com, our YouTube channel at DeSota Hills Baptist Church for all of our church family.

We love you.

We'll see you back here bright and early next Wednesday morning.

God bless.

This has been your midweek motivation.

We'd love to have you join us in person on Sunday mornings.

Our services are at 9 and 10 30 a.m.