It is amazing to wake up and realize one day that its been 9 months outside of your own culture. With three more different countries, customs, contexts, histories, languages(although was are in Spanish Speaking countries, there are a few differences in slang, style, accents, and cultural uses for words).
I didn’t take many pictures in El Salvador due to security issues. We worked in the prisons with the 18’s, one of the prevalent gangs in El Salvador. Some have become Christians, and the gangs respect Christians…real Christians that is. We found out that it was possible to leave the gangs by becoming a Christian, but it has to be for real and it must be by the permission of the gang leader. If someone comes to the leader and the leader grants him permission to leave the gang because he became a Christian-that individual will be followed for two years and in that time if he did anything that was not Christian (drinking, smoking, having sex, not attending church regularly) then they would be killed….DEAD!!!
All that being said-God is working in the gangs and even some of its leaders have come to know Christ!! There is freedom in prison; mental prisons, emotional prisons, bad habit prisons, spiritual prisons.
Now in Honduras we are working with an adult special needs center. Doing some manual labor and taking the roof off of one of the houses in order for a new roof to be put on. It’s been hard work, but worth it. The residences who live there are amazing! They love everyone that comes their way. It’s amazing that people with Down Syndrome and other terrible afflictions love each other and have more joy in their lives than many of us who are perfectly able to take care of ourselves and yet we complain about the smallest things that go wrong.
I’ve struggles with complaining to God to others and burn out. God is good and He always provides. One of our men went home. That was a hard pill to swallow and still is. It feels like losing one of your brothers, someone I’ve served with, bled with(literally bled on the beaches of Ghana!), sweated with, prayed with, toiled with everyday for eight months. Like I said, God is good and He always provides and strengthens us at exactly the right time and exactly the way we need it! I consider myself blessed to share in the sufferings of Christ. He experienced the worst of the worst for us so that we would have His joy and salvation of course!! Praise Him because of who He is, not for how we feel about Him. We pray because He is the Word and the Word is our daily bread(I’ve met missionaries in Asia who literally live off the Word and trust Him to sustain their physical bodies and stave off hunger, come on American church let’s step up our game!).
During the race I have grown even more in the love for the United States! It’s common that when people go on missions, especially the World Race, to fall in love with a people group or a country on the route and to move move there and serve as a long-term full-time missionary. That has happened to several members of my squad and God bless them in their calling! However, I have fallen more in love with the United States and my own people(our own people). I want folks back home to know (I mean really KNOW) that this “Bible stuff” is absolutely real! This is not just a moral code, or set of rules, or a get of Hell free card! Demons are real (I’ve seen them), Angels are real (seen those too). Healings happen according to God’s will and plan for all our lives. The Kingdom of God is here, it’s been here but we don’t bother to care or to notice most of the time. The Kingdom is structured, planned out, measured out, and perfect. I want to minister to American’s. I have been accepted to seminary and God has cleared the way logistically and financially to make that a reality!
Christianity is a global tribe! I want men to come on missions, to learn to live missionally at home, at work, at church(yup church too, the real gosple must be preached in church…sad that is a fight all on its own). I’m not going to try to change minds or hearts, that is the Holy Spirit’s job and what a pro He is (yup, it’s ‘He’ not ‘It’). I want men to come overseas and be woken up to the reality of the Kingdom of God, and because the church and missions fields need men, real men, men of common sense and widom from the Lord! Men grounded in scripure and truth. Men of courage, mental and physical toughness, stout hearts, and men of resolve to march forward!
“So preoccupied is the mind with myths and systems; so much do false deities crowd every place-earth, air, sky; so have they become of everything a part, that return to the first religion can only be along bloody paths, through fields of persecution; that is to say, the converts must be willing to die rather than recant. And who in this age can carry the faith of men to such a point but God himself? To redeem the race-I do not mean to destroy it-to redeem the race, he must make himself once more manifest; HE MUST COME IN PERSON.”-Balthasar the Egyptian, Ben-Hur.
“The world is not falling apart; it is falling into place for the return of our Lord, Jesus Christ.”-Jonathon Loudermilk.
We have two more months left. I write this in Guatemala at an AIM base in Antigua. This blog covers the activities from the past two months(two countries).
