Want to Love a Missionary?!
Meet Phil & Ruth Rochard, our lovely W Squad Coaches:
They will be coming out to join us for Debrief in Thailand at the beginning of December and have graciously agreed to open up their mailbox to any letter or card you would like to send my way! This can include encouragement, an update on your life, a drawing of the view out your window, gifts in the way of money or gift cards, and LOVE. No packages or padded envelopes due to space restrictions! Please mail them by November 20th to:
Laura Gamble
c/o Phil and Ruth Rouchard
1750 Cochran Road
Geneva, Florida (FL) 32732
There are stories that come out of the World Race of racers falling in love. They fall in love with a country, a ministry, a people group, or a contact. They leave at the end of their month with a piece of their heart left behind. They dream and pray and plan to return because that is where their heart remains.
That never happened for me. And definitely not in Nicaragua.
I spent December of 2011, my Month Three on the race, on Ometepe Island at CICRIN orphanage. It was, quite honestly, the most difficult month on the race for me. I was being attacked spiritually and emotionally and spent the entire month walking around on the verge of tears, often crying for reasons I couldn’t identify. I shut down emotionally and spiritually and refused to let others into the battle that was raging inside.
CICRIN December 2011
I knew while I was there almost two years ago that I was shutting down. I didn’t know how not to shut down and deal with what was going on in a healthy way. The things I wish I knew back then….
One of the perks of Squad Leading is that I get to travel around to the different teams at their ministry sites. We sent two teams to CICRIN last month, which meant I had the opportunity to go back. I was both excited and apprehensive to return to the place that held so much hardship for me.
When I walked back into CICRIN a few weeks ago, I didn’t have a lot of expectations that the kids would recognize or remember me. First because the orphanage is a revolving door of American missionaries coming and going, and second because I spent a lot of my time shut away crying.
My first morning back, I brought my computer to breakfast and showed some of the kids the pictures I had from two years ago. They absolutely loved it, teasing each other about the clothes they were wearing and reminiscing about the older kids who had moved on and were no longer there.
A fair number of them did say they remembered me, perhaps my face more than my name.
CICRIN October 2013
It was when I showed them the photos of the day when we decorated Christmas cookies that the kids lit up. More than anything else I had showed them, they remembered the party where we and got artistic and messy with frosting and sprinkles, the first time any of them had done anything like it.
Cookie decorating party December 2011
Perhaps the best that I could hope for is that they would forget me and the weeds I’d pulled or the papaya trees I helped plant, but remember the moments when they’d felt loved and cherished through me. What is important isn’t that I have a legacy when I return, but that the Lord used those moments to speak to these beautiful boys and girls about His affection and delight in them. The World Race isn’t about my own glory, but the fact that God showed up in my worst month to show His love through a broken vessel to kids who need it.
