This past month, my team and I took the saying “to get your hands dirty” to a whole new level.
We spent our time in Leon, Nicaragua doing construction at a site that will one day be a pastor’s retreat center. Our ministry contact, Pablo, has a five year vision for a place that will eventually include a chapel, missionary house, and a hotel to be used by a pastor’s association, as well as a high school to serve the surrounding community. As this center is still in the beginning stages, we were able to help with construction on the chapel, which is the first building on the land so far.
As the hired workers built the concrete walls of the chapel, we worked to build the foundation. In order to do this, we moved wheelbarrows of dirt and rocks from the surrounding land into the chapel so that we could build up the height of the floor and then used our “thumping” tools to pound down the dirt and rocks to make it solid.
These were our “thumping” tools:)
To do this efficiently, we split our team into pairs, and rotated around three stations: dirt, rock “harvesting”, and thumping. On a typical day, we would arrive at the construction site at 9 a.m., make it through a full rotation of our stations, break for lunch at noon, rotate through our stations again in the afternoon and finish our days completely covered from head to toe in dirt.
It was a month that tested our physical endurance, but that also brought us so much joy as we finished each day dirtier than ever and were able to see the progress that we had accomplished.
While I’ve never built a foundation for a building in the States, I’m guessing it looks a lot different than how foundations are built here in Central America. Having the opportunity to physically place the rocks in the church to build the foundation gives me so much more meaning to the verse:
“Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built”. Luke 6:47-48
We built that foundation with rock so that when storms come that chapel will not budge. If a building needs a strong base, how much more do we need a strong foundation for our lives? This month served as a wonderful reminder of just how much we need the foundation for our lives to be built on Jesus Christ – our solid rock – so that when trials and temptations come our way, we will not be shaken.
Thank you to all who have been praying and sending words of encouragement! Team Adelphoi is now serving as the Unsung Hero team this month in Costa Rica:)
Team Adelphoi and our rockman:)
