One area the Lord has really challenged me this month is strength. Not mine, but His. A major fear I had going into the Race is that I wouldn’t be able to hold my own when it came to physical strength. I don’t want to use age as a crutch or an excuse, but the fact is, your body doesn’t function at 30 the way it does at 20. I really struggled with this as our first area of ministry that was ALL manual labor.
Our second week with Pastor Arnold was spent in a small village of Penel building a fence surrounding a future camp site for children and adults to learn about Jesus. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this assignment, the surrounding foundation was constructed of one hundred 100 pound cement poles placed approximately 6 feet apart. Every 12th pole a half ton cement column was placed for support. And we were the ones going to put this thing together? Yeah right!
With every new task given, I couldn’t help but giggle in disbelief of what was being asked of our all girl team. Monday and Tuesday we moved posts, carrying them on our shoulders, above our heads, and on our hips across a muddy pasture. Wednesday we placed the posts into large holes that Praise the Lord had previously been dug for us. In each hole we placed large stones that also had to be carried a long distance. The stones were meticulously hammered into place to keep the posts from shifting during the rainy season. Thursday I shoveled a huge mound of gravel into countless 20 pound bags to be carried up the large hill. The gavel was then combined with the stones crushed using a sledge hammer, mixed with water to create cement, eventually poured into the holes.
Our last day with Pastor Arnold, Wendell, and Carlos was bittersweet. Although I was physically exhausted from the weeks work, I finally felt like I had finally gotten into my groove and the Lord revealed strengths in me I didn’t know that I had. Some of my squadmates had grown up on or near farms. I’ve never even held an ax before, but when I took a few swings with that thing, I felt something I have never experienced upon first try. I mean I chopped down a tree. A TREE!!! The feeling continued when shoveling heavy gravel, and busting stones. At the end of our first month of ministry, I couldn’t believe all the hard, and I mean HARD work that we had done. That I had done! The Lord is definitely teaching me to rely on His strength, not mine.
Me and Susan working hard 😉
