Hello lovelies! It has been WAY too long, but here’s part of what we’ve been doing so far as our ministry! Enjoy!
So far, our ministry hasn’t been working with kids, or in a church, or construction, or any of the things you typically expect when you hear the words “mission trip”. It hasn’t been what any of my team has expected, and some of us are struggling with accepting that we aren’t seeing people (other than each other) all the time. It almost seems sometimes that we have the most “boring” ministry. Some of us long for the chance to do a VBS or to participate with a church, but we were not placed in those areas.
Here in Albania, our team was blessed with a beautiful compound-slash-farm to stay in. There’s a lovely view, nice rooms, plenty of space, and good food provided for us. While we stay here, our ministry is to help with the daily chores that the head foreman has for us and we are working 6-7 hour days with weekends off. Our main job thus far has been whitewashing. Many of you may not know what whitewash is, but I’ll tell you. Whitewash (also called limewash) is a limestone and water mixture that when put on walls in thick layers, makes the walls white. It takes about 20 minutes for one coat to dry, and can take up to several hours if you put on multiple coats. It also makes everything it touches white, which is where the scrubbing comes in but more on that later. When our entire squad was here together, we each had individual jobs. Each team was a part of a group doing something: whitewashing, gardening, organizing the “backyard”, or cleaning animal pens. In the end, we had a majority of the squad working on whitewashing, once everything else was done. There were several areas that needed worked on: the animal pens, the old bathrooms, the outdoor walls lining the compound, and several other smaller areas. When our team first started doing whitewashing, we were optimistic about the area that we had; the old bathrooms were small, seemingly already nearly done, and were fairly shaded. Our host told us, “Two, maybe three coats, and we’ll see how it looks from there.” As soon as the team started, we realized what makes whitewashing so difficult: it’s as thin as water and doesn’t like to stay on your brush very long. We got to work, though, determined to make every inch of each of our walls white. Once we finished three coats, we took a step back and looked at our walls. None of them looked like they had improved. At all. They just looked… Wet. We went and found George, our ministry host, and asked him what he wanted us to do next. He asked us to do two more coats. So that’s what we did. We did two more coats on the entirety of our area. It still didn’t look very white, but it looked better than what we had started with. So we did an extra coat, just in case, and found George again. We asked him what we should do now that the coats were done, and he asked us to do more coats. We went through this cycle several more times before we were let off the clock after lunch. By the end of the workday (which ended at 12:30pm for the first week and a half), we were irritated and tired from doing the repetitive work for three and a half hours. We didn’t understand what the old man wanted us to do about these walls, because they would never appear white with tinted water, they needed some nice, thick outdoor white paint coats. The next day after a nice relaxing afternoon, we were put back to work. On the same area. We went through a similar cycle every day for three days. We were asked over and over again to go over it with more whitewash. It got to be very irritating, and my willing heart soon wore out with our tedious job. When George finally said that we were done with our area, I was over the moon. I was so excited that we were finally done whitewashing. Then he finished his request, which was to whitewash another area. I obliged, but was very unhappy with our job. The rest of the week, we continued whitewashing. We whitewashed for a week straight, along with a good chunk of our squad. It seemed so useless, like we were wasting time that could be spent on “better” things. The people around me really helped my anger and frustrations, as well as God helped me with that. They told me that maybe that’s how God and Jesus get about us. That no matter how much they scrubbed us white, clean as snow, we always have some tiny dark spots bleeding through. Instead of reacting with anger, they react with love and kindness and help us more. It took me awhile for that to really punch through my irritations, but it’s true. After the rest of our squad left, our jobs didn’t really change much. We had a couple additions that required people to stay on posts for the duration of our workday, but other than that, we’re still whitewashing, still gardening. One of the additions was gate duty, which I usually take because I get the welcome chance to read uninterrupted, and everyone else is glad I took the “boring” job. The other is shepherding. There’s about 20 sheep that we move from one yard to another in the mornings to maintain the grass there. Someone has to keep an eye on them because they like to eat the bark off of the trees in the yard which is no Bueno. I’ve shepherded a couple times, and it’s made me realize that God has a lot of patience. Sheep aren’t very smart animals, so they try to sneak some tree bark very obviously here and there. I realized while shepherding that we put Him through a lot. He gives us unending chances, and we usually screw them up pretty good really quickly. (I put this in better words to Abigail last week but now I can’t remember what I said.) He hollers at us that we’re doing something wrong, and we’ll ignore Him until later we realize that He was right.
Our last topic for today, scrubbing. One of our jobs last week was to scrub the whitewash that some clumsy teenagers (yes, that was us) got on gates and pen doors. Abigail and I got to work on scrubbing with some rags and water, and tried our hardest to make the doors as clean as we possibly could. It took a good two hours to clean nine doors of misplaced whitewash. By the end of it, our arms were sore and our fingers were tender and wrinkly from the water. Again, I was reminded of the hard work that God does to make us pretty again. To make us whole again. To make us Worthy again. I was reminded of the sacrifice He made for us. I was reminded of all of the pain He went through to save us.
Our ministry may not be working with kids right now, or working in a church, but it is important. It’s important because He’s working in us as well as we’re working in ourselves and in each other. We’re learning what hard work looks like and means, and we’re learning what He has in store for each of us.
