This month of ministry has probably been the most manual labor I’ve done all Race. Almost every day we’ve spent time on the property here at Apa Vie helping with projects here. We started off by cleaning out rooms so they could renovate the rooms to be new bedrooms. Then we helped some workers put new shingles on the roof, but the project we spent the most time doing was building a brick wall. We were taught how to mix the mortar and we reused old bricks from another part of the building to make the wall.
Now, none of us have ever built a brick wall. This was pretty new, and most of the time we weren‘t entirely sure what we were doing, but we did it the best we could. There were times where we felt like our work was inadequate, but our host Roy continued to encourage us even when we weren’t sure what to do.
I felt like building this wall was a physical representation of how a lot of this year felt. A lot of times we were asked to do things we were not always comfortable doing, or may have never done before, but we’d go in with a yes in our spirit and learn along the way. And even when we would mess up, God met us with grace and love, and would give us the tools we needed to keep going and do the job set before us.
We ended up finishing our wall, and I’ll have to admit, it’s not the most beautiful wall I’ve ever seen in my life, but it’s our wall, and we’re proud of it, just like this life we’ve been given. Sometimes life is messy, and compared to everyone else who seems to have it together, we’re just falling apart at the seams, but God steps in, fills in our cracks, and helps us stand firm and tall on the rock.
