We made it to our first ministry site! After about a 7 hour van ride, my team and team Hineni arrived in Puerto Barrios (located off the Atlantic Coast in between Honduras and Belize), where we have teamed up with Shofar Ministries. Our ministry this month will include anything from working at a local orphanage, performing dramas, preaching, playing soccer with street kids, doing some construction projects, and anything else that comes our way. We are all really excited and look forward to seeing what God does with our first month of the race!
Coming onto this trip, I wondered when the reality of this year would hit me. Could it be on day 11 when I didn’t come home (both my trips to Peru and Moldova were 10 days)… Or how about next month when I go to Nicaragua instead of back to the ATX? And what would I be doing? Would I be loving on orphans in the heat of Africa… Or walking through the streets of Asia struggling through the oppression of human trafficking? Apparently it wasn’t going to happen through any of this…
Yesterday afternoon we ended up going to a local pastor’s house to help give out clothes to local families out of his garage. In the middle of this, the team was about to perform some children’s songs for the kids when I was asked to cover the donations that were coming in. I was okay with that since I knew that I’d have plenty of opportunities these next 11 months to play with kids. However, I wasn’t expecting the reaction that came from that.
When my team finished up the dances for the kids, they ended up breaking into smaller groups and playing with the kids. I stood there watching the girls doing ‘London Bridge’, as one of the guys got into some intense games of ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ and the other was jumping around with some of the younger boys. While all this was going on, Spanish Christian music was going on in the background, with ‘Hallelujah’ constantly repeating. It seriously felt like I was in the middle of a movie.
To say it was surreal is definitely an understatement. This was not something like I had been taught in my high school world history class, had read in the National Geographic, had seen in a compassion advertisement on TV, or heard from the WR alumni. This is my life… and will be for at least the next 11 months.
As I stood there taking it all in, the reality of it all went even deeper. Seeing the looks on both my teammate’s faces and the kids was amazing. What was earlier a language and cultural barrier just didn’t matter anymore as the atmosphere was transcended with the Song of Love. And it was in that moment I realized that this was what the Kingdom of God was really was all about.
