One of our church camp themes growing up was “Attitude check?!….Praise the Lord!”
I never really know what I am getting into when I wake up in the morning.
No, seriously. The absolute norm on the WR is to wake up with either no clue whatsoever as to what the day will actually hold, or to be told as you sleepily eat your rice and bean breakfast that plans have changed. Even when we have at least a vague idea of where we are going and what to expect there, the actual work or interaction is always a mystery.
So naturally, this is a perfect place and opportunity for me to learn what it means to have the freedom to choose my attitude. At home, most people have at least an image in their mind of what their day will look like and tend to get out of bed with an attitude matching their feelings surrounding said plan. Here, our eyebrows raise all the way to our hairline sometimes when we hear the plan for the day, and I get to choose in that very instant how to approach the day.
Just a small handful of examples…
Get up on stage 10 minutes from now and preach….well, alrighty then!
Go sit in the dirt and play with kids who don’t speak English for a few hours….I’d love to!
Go crawl in that hole over there, filled with years worth of human feces, and dig until you hit water….um, gosh I would love to serve you in that way!
Take this picture of a 4×6 drawing and turn it into a mural on the front of our church…no prob, hand it over!
Go down the hill to the classroom full of thirty spanish-speaking 7 year olds and act as teachers assistant all morning…praise God for coffee.
Use this chisel to hack decaying cement off the wall of this classroom for a few hours…I’m bout to chisel like you ain’t never seen before!
Sit on this tin roof in 100 degree heat and hold these gutters in place while others work around you for a few hours…perfect, I was hoping to work on my sitting-indian-style tan.
I think you get the idea…
So yesterday when my group arrived for a day of ministry at an orphanage located on an all-organic farm, I was not overly surprised at the task given to us. Through broken Spanglish and charades, we finally gathered that we were to spend the day shoveling dirt and rocks, attempting to even the terrain of a large, hazardously uneven area that was being made into a basketball court for the orphans. All day.
To paint the picture for you…the 6 of us were facing enormous holes, hundreds of random pieces of broken cinder block and rocks, and 4 shovels with half of their handles missing. We were to grab a shovel and toss dirt around until the surface was a bit more even…in the blazing, 100 degree sun….during the overwhelmingly dusty air of Nicaragua’s dry season…hoping to accomplish by hand what people in the States would use several pieces of large equipment to do, accompanied by multiple breaks involving air conditioning and a drinking water source that doesn’t run out by lunchtime.
Here, on a silver platter, was a perfect opportunity to choose a positive attitude. Choose to let all of the above factors overwhelm me and choose to be whiny and annoyed?
OR…
Choose to spend the day getting to know a couple of the college kids we are working alongside, laughing at each others hilarious stories and hearing each others dreams? Choose to have fun with it and have a “discus throwing” contest and a “who can work with a mouthful of water the longest without swallowing” contest? Choose to periodically announce what an “excellent job you just did throwing that shovel full of dirt!”, and attempting to apply the biblical concept of “faith that can move mountains” (or dirt piles, for that matter)?
By the grace of God, I was able to pick the second option. I had a moment of overwhelmed “Ummm, guys, how in the world are we going to make this happen?”, but it quickly passed and I can honestly say that I had an incredibly satisfying day. The work was not as hard as it may have first appeared, and I love to imagine the kind of fun and enjoyment that kids will have there for years to come.
I even got to apply my squad leader Allan’s philosophy of “you do not have because you do not ask.” As a random guy trotted down the road on a beautiful horse with a giant bag of rice, I ran up to him and asked if I could ride his horse. He said yes, and I hopped up and rode around shouting “yee-haw!” a little bit and then let him go merrily on his way.
And I bet you if I had had a sour, woe-is-me attitude, I would never have had the memory of riding that gorgeous horse on an organic farm overlooking a mountain in Nicaragua.
I can guarantee you that none of this “choose a positive attitude” stuff is news to anyone. We all know that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we respond to it. But for the first time in my life, my attitude is literally one of the only things I have the freedom to choose on a journey where food, lodging, transportation, and my schedule is all chosen FOR me.
And ironically enough, this paradox has brought me a ton of freedom. Freedom to realize that I will never be able to control every detail of my life, but I can ALWAYS choose my attitude.
And a bigger freedom…the freedom of realizing that only God truly knows what each day will hold, and being able to walk with peace and joy through the day knowing that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God that can take care of the details is right beside me. Who knows what tomorrow will hold? All I can say with this freedom is…well, whatever it is, bring it on!
