As I hopped off of an incredibly small aircraft in the San Andrés airport into the warm island night, I could not have felt LESS like a missionary. Fellow passengers with crisp, clean, clothing and expensive iPhones breezed by us, chattering excitedly in anticipation of the vacation time ahead because after all- why would anyone be on a Caribbean island for anything else? I suddenly felt terribly plain and underdressed in my oversized quick-dry t-shirt and chacos and even snuck into the bathroom on our way out to nervously analyze the “damage” of my makeup-less face. I was still in the process of coming to terms with the wide-eyed looking girl that would be staring back at me for the foreseeable future, a challenging feat when standing next to gorgeously manicured Colombian women. My reflection looked as foreign to me as the country I was now inhabiting for the next month.
Our team had collectively been thrilled about getting San Andrés as our assignment for the month in Colombia. We cheered like manics at Training Camp when we found out about our lucky placement and have been dreaming about the island ever since. We were greeted by Pastor Arnold at the airport, a man of island ease and confidence who we found impossible to not be impressed by. Up arrival at the church, we found beds, our own meeting space, WiFi (Hallelujah), and a lovely woman who’s job it was to prepare our meals and do our laundry. To be frank- luxury was an understatement. It took us only about 12 hours following our arrival to start asking ourselves, “How did we get so lucky? And when was the other shoe going to drop?”
The truth is, as our amazing assignment for the month became a reality, guilt began to creep in like an early- morning fog, trapping the light out of our little oasis and bringing a heavy sense of confusion and lack of direction. No matter how our team tried to spend our free time, we always ended the day with team feedback that aired out our discontentment. We certainly weren’t discontent with being on San Andrés, our awesome ministry host, or our schedule. But the fact remained- we were struggling to let ourselves be HAPPY and we couldn’t seem to figure out why. We never went hungry, got to have Bible studies on the shore of the Caribbean ocean during free time, and prayed over hundreds of people during ministry hours. And yet.
The truth is, during those several hours of ministry a day, I could not have felt more useless. The language barrier became not only an obstacle, but a painfully humbling one as a teammate good nature-dly pointed out to me, “I don’t think “Mucho gusto” means exactly what you think it means” which just so happened to be the ONLY thing I had said in Spanish the previous two hours that night. I felt drained and exhausted trying to find something to contribute and I even found myself day-dreaming about harder mission placements throughout the day in mild desperation. I was struggling, I found, because my usefulness had become my identity and God was ready to teach me something new about Himself and His heart.
We’re still in the trenches here on San Andrés Island, just not in the ways that we expected to be. Instead of exhausting and challenging ministry sites and work, this month has become a deeper look inside and a chiseling away at pride, self- sufficiency, and isolationism. We’ve grown closer as a team, spoken things out loud that had been long hidden in the dark, and pressed in to the heart of God. And perhaps the greatest gift: we’re learning to receive from our good Father what we could never earn but what He’s freely giving anyways. San Andrés has been one enormous gift after another and little by little, a peace has settled on our camp.
Who knows- maybe by the end of the Race we’ll finally truly trust the Giver. For now, it’s still a work in progress. But He’s got all the time in the world.
