Ministry Update!
We’ve been in El Tunco, El Salvador serving with the local church, La Red, for a little over a week. Our ministry this month consists of helping with La Red’s women’s and children’s ministry, tutoring several local Salvadorian kids in English, connecting with locals and tourists, preparing English lesson plans for La Red’s summer program, creating an operations manual for La Red’s Surfing Ministry, and generating social media posts to keep La Red’s supporters updated on what the Lord is doing here. Next week we get to help a Christian surfing media team film a promotional video about Surfing Ministries, El Salvador.
Wave after wave, tide in, tide out, day and night. It never ends. The shore is constantly pounded by wave after wave. Each wave holds tremendous power to shape the shoreline, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but no matter the outcome the shoreline has changed.
When we first arrived in El Tunco, our host Andrea took us on a small tour of the town which eventually ended on the beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was gorgeous; however, one thing that struck me was the lack of a beach. Where once the coast was lined with black sand, it was now buried under feet of rocks. Andrea told us that several years ago massive waves had crashed unto this portion of the beach dredging up millions of rocks varying in size from baseballs to soccer balls. The once beautiful beach was gone; in the blink of an eye it was destroyed and it remains rocky to this day. El Tunco and the other surrounding communities lack the funds and infrastructure to remove the rocks and bring in new sand. These small tourist communities will forever be changed and they have realized that they can’t change nature’s course; the rocky shore is a fate they have accepted.
How often do we fight nature’s course? How often do we fight God’s course? His will for our lives. Aren’t we quick to right the sinking ship, even if it’s God’s will that it sinks? We often tell ourselves that God didn’t really didn’t mean for the ship to sink. But that thinking is foolishness; how are we to tell God, what His will is? Just think about Joseph’s life. His brothers sold him into slavery, but
“the Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man,”
— Genesis 39:2
Joseph became the overseer of Potiphar’s house until he was wrongly accused and thrown into prison. Then the Lord brought up Joseph and placed him second in commanded over all Egypt, so that through Joseph’s success, Israel would become a great nation.
“And God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God.”
— Genesis 45:7-8
It can be so hard to see God’s will in bad circumstances, it can take years and years and sometimes we never see God’s will. And that’s difficult for us to understand, because we are finite beings. In Romans 8:18-30, Paul reminds us
“that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing
with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
— Romans 8:18
All that we suffer on this earth is nothing in comparison to the
“adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. … And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good,”
— Romans 8:23,28
We are to trust God and His will for our lives no matter what it looks like, whether its rocky shores or a beautiful beach. Remember that no matter what your shoreline looks like, the waves of His love will wash ashore, and with each wave the ability to reshape the shoreline of your life.
Here are several pictures from our ministry location!
