Hello everyone! I’m so excited to finally be writing to you from Quito instead of a place of preparation. This place is so unbelievably beautiful. The people are so kind (and let me tell you, Latin America feeds you WELL). Our home is lovely and our ministry is incredible. My team and I are working at a school, T.W. Anderson and we’ve recently found out that we get to live in Quito and partner with the school for all 3 months in Ecuador!! There’s so much potential for relationship and connection here. If I’m being honest with you, I have yet to struggle with homesickness to the extent that I have struggled with confusion. I never thought I would have so many questions and be so thirsty for answers. My friend Sydney said over and over that she imagined herself as a more mature, more spiritual person when it came time to leave, but then months passed and launch came and she was just Sydney. She wasn’t the person she visualized, she was just herself and this was real and she was going just the way she was. There’s a raw desire and longing that comes with actually being on the field. Life becomes a choice. Mission becomes a choice. One of our mentors says that the race really can change your life…if you let it. We’ve been called to a place but there’s no time left for preparation. It’s here and we’re here and this is it. Showing up becomes a choice. Coming to the fountain becomes a choice.
Last night during our team time, I was finally able to share with my team about my missing piece. The piece that I thought, if I could figure out, would connect all my dots and make everything so much more intimate. The piece that could switch on the lightbulb and make me understand how all the things I’ve heard in church all my life actually become real. I wondered if there were rules. I wondered if it were against those rules for me to ask God to show me what Lori was going to tell me at our meeting had He not taken her days prior. Hannah stopped me mid-sentence and told me that while I was talking, she envisioned my house and God’s house at opposite ends of a street. She saw Him send me letter after letter after letter, which I would toss out, one by one. Finally I opened one invitation, read it, got in my car, drove to the house, rang the doorbell and when the door opened, I wouldn’t go inside.
How fitting that this morning at church, we were told to turn to Isaiah 55 and learn about accepting God’s invitation into surrender. I just laughed, for who am I to doubt? Who am I to second-guess the power of living in freedom?
They closed out the service with Good Good Father, Lori’s song. (So in case you were wondering, nothing is against the rules.)
The kids at the school need people who walk in freedom. The young mothers who live in the house up the street need girls who believe in new life.
“Seek God while He’s here to be found, pray to him while He’s close at hand. Let the wicked abandon their way of life and the evil their way of thinking. Let them come back to God, who is merciful, come back to our God, who is lavish with forgiveness. He who says, ‘I don’t think the way you think. The way you work isn’t the way I work.’” – Isaiah 55: 6-8 (MSG)
Ecuador needs a people who abandon their own agendas for something greater and embrace the truth that they were made for so much more.
Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating, but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending. – Crazy Love by Francis Chan
