Something I learned from my Dad once was if you don’t know where to start, sometimes it’s best to just start. Just pick something and go with it.
This first week here is difficult to describe, so I’ll start with the basics and maybe move on from there, we’ll see. Or we won’t, either way.
We are living on the island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua in, you guessed it, Nicaragua and it is all squad month. This means that all twenty of us are here together living in one house with six bathrooms and tomorrow our two squad leaders are expected to join us. It’s not nearly as bad as it sounds.
This space and property, known as Cicrin (SEE-crin) used to be an orphanage, but is now a nonprofit that houses a couple kids from the community whose parents and families can’t take care of them and provides a school for multiple other kids in the community. They all come from a variety of colorful backgrounds, but the ones we’ve met here have been so loving and welcoming that it’s difficult to imagine they’ve had anything but love and affection all of their young lives. Still, perhaps it’s a learned trait that in order to receive love we must look and act a certain way, we must be inviting in order to be invited in.
We are right on the lake water and the view is gorgeous, so whenever the day gets too hot or muggy, we can always head down to the pavilion where there are several hammocks from which to choose.
Our ministries here involve us breaking up into teams again in order to spread our resources out to the whole of the community here. One group is up at the school as they wrap up this month for the summer. One group is assigned to help with the food clean up and grounds work as it comes up throughout the day, and our group has spent the week praying for Cicrin, the kids, the staff here, the property, etc. Each week we will rotate jobs between our teams so we each have a chance to serve in different capacities.
In case any of you were wondering, we also do not have internet here, we have to catch a bus into town to get it, so that’s why there’s two blogs this week. I have no idea when I’ll next have it, so these are for the past two weeks.
But back to ministry. We were warned when we began praying by the staff here that this is an area of Spiritual warfare. Our response was something along the lines of, “yeah, noted. Okay, cool.”
What we weren’t expecting to find out is how real warfare is so quickly. The first morning we gathered together, even before we sat down as a team, we fractured. There was disunity and some serious struggle bussing. We slowly fought to pull all of the pieces back together, but every day is a battle, every day we have to choose each other again, we have to choose to trust and to love each other. I’ve had to deal with lies from Satan that I’ve dealt with before, forcing me to seriously consider my faith and the structure on which I’ve built my life. I even found myself wondering if I would be the first Racer to ever loose her faith because of the race.
I questioned whether or not the voice in my spirit I call God really was him or if I’ve been listening to something else for all these years. I questioned whether or not God is good if I feel him saying one thing only for something else to happen. I had to hand him back promises I feel like he’s made to me because I’ve taken more control of them than I have a right to. I have to give him back dreams and ideas that spark my heart because I can’t hold onto them right now. Every day I have to make the choice not to isolate from my team, but to choose to trust them with how I’m really doing and allow them to have access to ways to love me which can also be flipped into ways to hurt me. I have to choose to trust God. And it’s not easy.
It’s not easy to feel like half the rock you’ve been chilling on just disappeared into the shark-infested waters beneath you.
So, conclusion: warfare is real. Just because we don’t necessarily name it as such in the States, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or it’s not something that our country deals with.
I’m not there yet, I don’t have everything figured out and I’m not sure how to be okay right now. That’s not even everything I’ve been confronting this week. But in spite of how it sounds it’s been a great week. It’s been an awful week, but it’s also been a great week.
Until next time then,
TL
