It’d be the busiest month of ministry yet and my favorite thus far. It’s the first country since the start of the Race that I could see myself coming back to. My team and I stayed in an abandoned hostel in Uyuni, 20 minutes from the Salt Flats. We had running water most of the time…in truth, you could call it a drizzle. And the floor above our rooms we setup to use as our classroom for ministry. Each person on my team taught on the subject of our choice, and mine, you guessed it, was Bio. It was a blast to invest in the kids of Uyuni and be able to point the created to their Creator.
Mornings, afternoons, and evenings–pretty much whenever we had a chance outside of meals, team meetings, and four 3 hr. weekly church services—we spent prepping for class. Sometimes you’d only have 5 minutes before the start of your class to run out and find the nearest photocopy place open during Siesta. Sometimes you’d be running around town for three hours to find multiple shops since none carried enough paper for your 300 copies. And on top of all that, sometimes you’d get distracted by the locals on the street selling their fresh papas rellenos.
Our days were literally scheduled to the T this month. So this past week as our time in Bolivia came to a close, I was thankful to find much needed downtime to just be in the Word. I started reading in Genesis and came to chapter 22. At the beginning of this story God calls to Abraham, and Abraham’s first response to Him is, “Here I am.” Then God tells Abraham something he’d never have expected: Go, sacrifice your son Isaac, and go to the mountain I will tell you about. Keyword: Will. Not at the moment. But soon enough.
For the first time in this story I saw that God told Abraham to go but He didn’t yet tell him to which specific mountain he should go. And I realized that God sometimes tells us to GO, but He still gives us opportunity to WAIT for what He has next. He didn’t give all the details up front. Sometimes He calls us to what may not immediately make sense to us as we with our human eyes and finite minds try to understand His plan. But as His children may we be like Abraham in those situations and simply say, “Here I am” and trust that God will lead and provide for what’s next and in His perfect timing. (…sounds a lot like the Race to me.)
