“For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.” {Romans 12:4}
God is challenging me to live out this verse here in Costa Rica as my team and I serve our ministry. My team ministers to an after school program for kids who live in a neighborhood called Los Anonos where drugs, prostitution, abuse, and other kinds of violence and negative influences can be seen. The program holds classes for art, dancing, cooking, computer skills, jujitsu, and other topics as well as tutoring. The program’s goal is to teach these kids skills to stop the cycle of poverty and instead set them up for success.
My team is blessed with volunteering at the program from 3pm – 6:30pm on Monday – Wednesday, with Thursday as our off day, then Saturday from 9am-12:30pm, and nothing on Sundays. While there we get to play with the kids and simply love on them. My team mostly helps outside of the classes the program offers. There’s a playground, a small soccer field, a table with board games, and a table for coloring where we get to interact with the kids.
My personal struggle then stems from two things: the limited amount of time we have at ministry and the position I was chosen for in the program.
Other teams get to do multiple ministries and volunteer for a total of 7-8 hours a day where as my team only gets about 3 hours of ministry time. The squad has breakfast at 6:30 every morning, so I have 8 hours of time to kill before we leave for ministry. My team plans to spend this time either serving our squad (cleaning the house, doing laundry, or maybe even occasionally baking cookies for them to come home to) or walking around our neighborhood looking for ways to minister close to home. Hopefully, God will give us instruction on how to spend our free time fruitfully. Meanwhile, I will be praying to receive another ministry that can occupy our mornings. Now, for the three hours we do have ministry, I was chosen for the receptionist position. This means that I sit behind a desk and pass out a snack to each child, recording their name so that no one sneaks an extra snack. I struggle with this position because I do not get to interact with the kids much so I feel like it will be a challenge for me to make an impact, which is what I strive to do here.
With this, I continue to remind myself of the verse I opened with. Serving this ministry is not about me and what I want, but rather it is about doing what they need, even if I feel as though it is pointless. Whatever the job may be it is still service to the Lord. I need to remember that tiny jobs are still vital, just like the pinky toe of a human body; it may seem insignificant and as if it serves no purpose, but if you remove the pinky toe, you lose balance. So even though the pinky toe itself has no functional value, removing it would make running, walking and skipping nearly impossible. And that is what my role is in my ministry, it may not be the most upfront and center job, or the most exciting, but without it the rest of the body would not be able to function smoothly.
