Our two teams, Lovebound and Prisma, are very good at over analyzing everything. I don’t mean the big stuff…I mean everything. Before a decision, big or small is made, we go over it…and over it….and over it. We weigh the pros and the cons, get everybody’s opinions and thoughts, look at our plan of execution, and we discuss it until we all come to the conclusion that we are thinking about everything way more than we need to be. This particular issue came into effect the other day when half of our group went to do construction at Four Square Ministries and the other half of us were going to do an “Ask The Lord” day and go down to the river barrio. Of course, since it’s us I’m talking about, we were worried that we didn’t have much of a plan.
We thought that us taking a soccer ball down to the slums of Alejuelita and “see what happens” would potentially be a disaster, but Scotty (team Prisma’s leader) said we needed to first seek the Lord and the will of God before we did anything else. We gathered together and asked for the Holy Spirit to intercede for our day and guide us to where we needed to be. It was a PHENOMENAL idea on Scotty’s part. After we prayed we were immediately guided to where we needed to be. We felt the Lord taking us near a bridge and as we were approaching the bridge we glanced over and saw that there were hundreds of women and children in this outdoor covered basketball court. I went to investigate and I found out it was a Christmas program for the children of the barrio!! One of “The Vineyard” churches down here in Costa Rica was putting it on for the kids and it was so wonderful to see all of their smiling faces.
We talked with some of the volunteers from Vineyard church and we realized that our new “Tico” Costa Rican friend, Natalia (who goes to church at 6:8 Ministries as well as the Vineyard) was there helping out! What a “God thing” it was running into her. She and her friends said that our group was more than welcome to help out for the day. I got to face paint tons of kids faces with butterflies and kittens and hand out Christmas presents to the children that the Vineyard donated for them.
I made friends with two of the mothers there: Angie Marie (JUST LIKE ME!) and sister, Claudia. They let me hold their babies and put face paint on their children and I got to meet their entire family of 30 people at the end of the Christmas program. It was amazing being able to do relationship evangelism on top of playing and loving on kids. There was a nativity play that some of the older children put on for the younger kids, which was adorable, and there were lots of games for everyone to participate in. At the end, before they got their Christmas presents, which really reminded me of “Operation Christmas Child,” they got a hot dog and some juice for lunch.
At the end of the day, all five of us realized that we couldn’t have planned a better, more beautiful day on our own. We couldn’t…but God did. The Lord loved that we went to Him first and He completely blessed us with a day of loving on children and their mothers. That day we realized that instead of over analyzing everything we do in ministry, we should just let the Holy Spirit lead. His plan is much better than anything we could come up with by ourselves. And that, is the lesson learned: let the Spirit lead!!
