The bus, which we were told to wait for at 9 a.m. every morning but never arrived before 10, would take us down the mountain and through the capital city on the highway. Approaching 80 miles per hour and speeding past other cars waiting to turn left — on their left-hand side, no left — we would watch the city go by, seeing shopping malls and abandoned buildings and, always watching us in return, a giant statue of Jesus. We hoped that through His heart, we might change others' each day.
The church where we worked, where we would sometimes wait two hours or the whole day for our pastor, was perched upon an opposing mountain and offered an unobstructed view of the city. The city of Los Pinos, the church's main area of ministry, sometimes just seemed asleep when we were there, with high teenagers and empty houses.
In Honduras, we would hurry up … and wait.
It wasn't until two weeks in, while I was talking on the street outside Pastor Nicholas' church with him and two of his leaders, that I realized what I had overlooked. In my desire to work more, I had missed the work that I had been doing. Here I was, having a conversation with three people who had never before met missionaries from the U.S. I was becoming a part of the community of Los Pinos.
We never did the kind of "work" that you might expect from missionaries in Honduras; we didn't build a house, we didn't dig a well, and we didn't bring hundreds of people to Christ. But we were there. We were the aroma of Christ to those who believed and those who didn't. In the last two weeks, we took time to have more conversations and to be satisfied with where the Lord was leading us each day. And now that we are gone, we get wallposts that have been Google Translated from Spanish to English and are tagged in cheesy Christmas photos (see right) — because that's what being part of a family looks like.
The heart that changed in Honduras the most was the one that I least expected: my own.
