How often do you get permission to key a car?
How often do you get permission to key a car for the Lord?
This past week, me and my team were able to serve our host by doing just that. Pastor David owns a 1970-something Datsun, we have dubbed "El Classico." It was rumored from Day 1 that he would have us work on it, but it took until the last week we were with them until it actually happened. The car is a fixer-upper and we were more than willing to help. The first thing we did for it was work on padding door panels for the inside. We spent the last several days "sanding" the paint off the car so that it could be repainted.
In the US, this would be a simple task that would take only a few hours to do. But in Santa Cruz del Quiche, "sanding" is a relative term. We spent the first two days "sanding" with just screwdrivers, paint scrapers, and Diablo paint remover. The first step of the process was to score the entire surface of the outside of the car, in essence keying the car with screw drivers and paint scrapers. We had a blast with this, with both Julio and Rene joining in on the fun! After that, we used paint stripper and the scrapers to remove it.
Layer after layer came off: red, grey, tan, white, bondo… until finally we made it down to the bare metal. After two or three days of repeating the process of keying, remover-ing, and scraping, a friend of Pastor David's lent us a power sander. The bondo was the worst part to get off and the sander blasted through it so easily. It still took another two days to get it all off, but it went a whole lot faster than by hand. We all took turns using the sander, seeing how far we could get before we couldn’t feel our arms.
The El Classico Project was probably the last thing you would think of when you thought of work that a missionary would do. But that's the beauty of it! Other teams were working with their hosts and after a week of work were told that there was no more work to be done. We formed such great relationships with our hosts and in my opinion, had THE BEST ministry contact of the month! Every time we finished a project, they had another one for us to start. Wherever there was a need, we were there with sleeves rolled up and ready to work on whatever they needed.
And that is the true purpose of missions. Not to come in with an agenda, but to serve in the need that is there. Sometimes that need is great, sometimes smaller, but either way it is a need that needs met. And a lot of the time, you don't know the need until you are there in the midst of it. That is the lesson of the Footwashing, too. That is the lesson the Lopez family has taught our team this past month. You will be greatly missed, but never forgotten.
PS We actually convinced a majority of our squad that we had bought El Classico for Q1000 (~$125) and were planning to drive it to Honduras. We later told them we were kidding and were just housing it in the garage for our host. 😉
