When packing for this trip 8 months ago, I wasn’t sure what to bring and what to leave home. Like most racers I ended up taking more stuff then I needed. One of those things I packed was my baseball glove. My initial thought was, “They play baseball in Puerto Rico and the D.R. so maybe I will get to do it during my first two months.” I was wrong. I got to play ball in these first two countries, but it was the other kind, basketball. Now its month 8 and I’m in Central America where all they do is play soccer. I was losing hope and even debating sending my glove home when I saw my dad in Costa Rica in month 7, but man am I glad I didn’t!
I arrived in Nicaragua for the beginning of month 8 and it was MANistry month! No girls, no drama, no tears, no craziness, and most importantly no long feedback sessions :). We were dropped off by the bus at night so for our hour long ride to our location we couldn’t see much of the landscape. The next day our host took us around and I was shocked at what I saw. As we drove along on these dirt roads I saw cows, horses, pigs, a whole family on one dirt bike, and baseball fields!!! Yep, there were baseball fields all over the place. They weren’t the nicest fields I had ever seen or even played on, but they were there nonetheless.
The first week came and went and it was filled with manual labor and bonding with the boys. Our focus this month was to help out Michael Lindsey and Waves of Love Ministry by using our muscles to do things around his property in order to get it ready for teams in the future. This was awesome and I enjoyed every second of it, but it meant less relational ministry with the community, which in turn meant no baseball.
We woke up one morning in the second week for breakfast and the good news rang out. “We are going to play baseball against a team in La Salinas.” My face lite up! 7 months of holding on to that glove was all worth it just to play one game. I was ecstatic! I immediately ran upstairs to find my glove and when I put it on something didn’t feel right. I took my hand out and my fingers were covered in dust, so I had to literally wipe the dust off of it, but I was ready. It was game time!
We arrived at the field and the other team was already there and practicing. They all had gloves, they all could catch and throw, they all looked like ballplayers. We had one glove (mine), 2 people who have ever played organized baseball before, and one ball. We didn’t have the best baseball players in the world on our team, but we had heart and the love of Christ with us, which was the whole point of playing the game to begin with. The plan was to build a relationship with these men and then invite them to the program we were doing in the same city the following night.
I wont get into details about the game, but lets just say it wasn’t pretty. We did have a lot of fun though and we were able to invite them to the program the next night and to our surprise most of them showed up! I learned a lot from this game. I learned that Nicaraguans have a love for the game of baseball. I also learned that this was still a love of mine. But the most important thing was that I had this feeling that the Lord wasn’t done with me in Nicaragua. He wanted me to use this commonality of a love for baseball that I had with the people in order to show them my true passion in life, which is following, living like, and having a personal relationship with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I’m not exactly sure what this will look like in the future, but just to make sure I didn’t just write it off as an ordinary everyday feeling, the Lord broke my heart again at the end of the month in a way that I had never felt before.
