Well, it was a bitter sweet end to our month in Nicaragua. For Estella, we poured the footers and laid the brick for all four walls of her new house. And for Antonia’s house, we laid the block, poured the concrete, cut and welded the joists, and left everything ready to go for the tin roof to be installed.
The projects were bitter sweet because although we accomplished a lot with the time we were given to work at the sites, we weren’t able to completely FINISH both houses. At first, I felt bad about not being able to finish what we came here to do. But, on the last day of work, God gave me a strong slap in the face.
We needed water to mix the mortar at the site of Estella’s new house. And apparently, the only place to get water was at a well about 100 yards down the road. We picked up our 5 gallon buckets and headed towards the well. We get there and start manually pumping the water out of the ground. It wasn’t easy, but it gave us water, the product we needed to complete our ministry work. As I’m pumping, I look down and notice and plaque on the floor of the pump:
This pump was provided by Living Water International
2001
It was then that I realized why I wanted to finish both projects. Because, selfishly, I wanted to finish them so that I could show them off as our own work, a shrine to what we accomplished. I wanted to be able to put our own plaque on the houses. And because we weren’t going to finish them, most likely, no one was ever going to know that we worked here.
After seeing the Living Water plague, God gave me a simple reminder: We would have been unable to work on Estella’s house if Living Water had not installed that water pump. And similarly, the workers that will come behind us can not finish the houses without the foundation we laid for them.
I saw how much ministries feed off each other in that way. It’s not about what I can put my name on at the end of the day. It’s about PREPARING THE WAY for others to finish. It's about relationships. It’s about doing whatever it takes, as long as you leave the taste of Jesus in their mouth when you depart.
The wall I built is the one on the left. The wall on the right, on the other side of the door, was laid by Chile. We had such a great time arguing over who's wall was better!
Some of the older boys having fun on our last day.
This is one of my Sandlot boys, Daniel.
