We are ending our month in Ecuador and I can’t believe how fast it has gone. Sure, there have been days (and maybe some weeks) where it has felt as if time walked rather than ran; however, for the majority of the days here we have scratched our heads at their disappearance.
God has been drilling in me and my team that He is still prevalent in the small and simple things. I came into The World Race not wanting expectations of how the year should be or look like, but expectations were inevitable (and I know I can speak for my team as well). This month has been so different from everything that we expected, but God wanted us to learn something new about Him. And I have!
We have been blessed to get a change pretty much every week with the type of ministry we do. This past week, our church had its VBS. My team and I enjoy working with kids, so we were all looking forward to this ministry. After our first day with the kids, the ministry proved to be a little more challenging than what we thought. The language barrier really got to all of us, but even worse, this past week was ridiculously hot and humid…which, unfortunately, added to our irritability. There were so many things that God taught us through the children though.
It's amazing how kids will warm up to perfect strangers. Teaching the kids a song at VBS.
As a team, we have been reading through the book Forgotten God by: Francis Chan. One of the examples that Chan uses of how we should approach the Holy Spirit is like his children: not asking questions, but simply doing what the Scriptures say and seek him out. That allowed me and my team to really go into that week of VBS with an open mind about children and about how we should act the same, like Jesus said in Matthew, “He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”
Even though none of the kids spoke English, and I spoke very little Spanish, they still talked to me as if I knew exactly what they were saying. I could pick up on certain words, but for the most part I responded with “si”, “no”, or “no entiendo”. I felt so useless because I couldn’t teach a class, I couldn’t sing in any songs, and I couldn’t even converse just a little with any of the kids.
Then things with our team were getting frustrating and I was feeling as if I was losing control of my team, and worse yet, of myself. There were many mornings where I would wake up with an awful attitude and would take it out on my team. In most cases, I knew I shouldn’t, but there were no other English-speaking people around.
Serving the kids juice at VBS.
You can't see it, but these girls loved my nose ring so much that one of the girls ripped off her sequins
from her shirt so that she and the others could put it on their noses.
One night, when we were all sitting in church, I was journaling and praying. (When we don’t preach, all of the sermons are obviously in Spanish; therefore, church time has become my time of devotions.) After a frustrating day filled with crazy kids, frustrating comments, and too much heat, I sat down on the church pew and started praying. My mind was in a million different places and my prayer only resulted in two sentences: “God, what is wrong with me? I need an attitude check.”
The next day was almost the same thing—kids, comments, and heat—but at night we were invited to a house of a woman at the church. Well, it was more of a cement slab. My team and I walked a few blocks from our church to her house, exhausted from the day, to a house full of people waiting to hear what the Americans had to share in the Bible. We had nothing prepared, so we through together some verses and patched some Spanish words together to form a sentence. These people were hanging on our every word. Even though we didn’t have anything elaborate for them that evening, they loved hearing what we had to say. When we finished, they wanted us to sing them songs and then pray over them. We were all astounded at how loving these people were. God knew exactly what each of us needed at that point. Our cups were full again.
As I said in the beginning, God has been teaching me to see Him in the small things. I came into this month wanting huge, spiritual things to happen, but God had a different plan for me.
Just like I said earlier, my prayer a couple nights ago was only two sentences—and probably half-hearted—but God still met me in my time of prayer and the next day I had this overwhelming peace. Also, like I said earlier, it has been ridiculously hot. One night, my teammates and I were sitting on the roof of our house together and this cool breeze blew past us. We all sat in pleasant silence and praised God for that breeze. [Praise Me even in the small things.]
God gave me a vision of His hand at work throughout this year. During Ecuador, His hand was moving slowly, almost as if to not spill anything over the edges. The following month, His hand moved a little faster. The following month, faster yet…and so on. There are so many times when I hope and pray that God will do a mighty work in me and my team, but what I’m hoping for is that He will move as if we were a few months down the road. In this vision, He was telling me that we can’t skip steps in order to obtain the prize. His hand, even though it may be slow right now, but it is still at work! Such a precious word for me to hear at that exact moment!
Tomorrow (Sunday, August 14, 2011) we leave for Quito to meet up with the rest of our squad. We will stay one night in a hostel in Quito and then travel at 7:00PM (EST) on Monday night to arrive at the border of Ecuador and Peru at 7:00AM on Tuesday morning. We will take another bus about four hours south of the border to reach our city of Chepen.
Stay tuned for what God has for us in Peru!
A family at the church crammed on their Lauren, my teammate, giving a shot to our pastor!
only mode of transportation.
