When we had those three months in Gainesville, we did eventually get to work with Samaritan’s Purse disaster relief and directly impact communities who had been hit the hardest by the hurricanes last fall. But I wouldn’t say that’s the only ministry I was doing. My ministry was to my squad and to my team, to love the people God has placed in my life well. I saw so much growth in this squad as we learned how to minister to one another, by hanging out and playing games with each other but also by speaking the truth in love and walking alongside each other in hard things.
That ministry prepared us well for our first two weeks in the Dominican Republic, where we serve with Mission of Hope and live at the MOH base.
The main way Mission of Hope works is by hosting short-term teams to partner in long-term work that local pastors are doing until the local church eventually has enough resources to continue the work MOH helps start (fun fact: this work started in Haiti 20 years ago and all MOH projects in Haiti are now completely Haitian-run!) This could look like building houses or churches, doing mobile clinics, or installing water filters. The MOH base here in Santiago is a little newer and so the main ministry is actually just to go out into the communities nearby and find out more about what the people’s needs are and how MOH can help most effectively. So our ministry is called SMT (strategic ministry time) and we go out with a different local pastor each week to his community, getting to know people in the neighborhood, asking about their lives, and sometimes even evangelizing too.
The day after we arrived here, two high-school-age groups also came! One was a Christian school from Atlanta, the other a youth group from Rochester, and D Squad had a blast getting to meet new people and talk to Americans again 🙂
We started doing SMT with them, but in an unfortunate turn of events, we had to quarantine on campus for a week. It was hard because after only one day of “ministry”, we had to stop. The MOH staff had projects we could do on campus, but because there were so many of us, the short-term teams got priority and D Squad had nothing scheduled for a couple days.
Until some of the teams’ leadership came over to our squad leaders and asked them if we knew how much of a difference we were making. Just by us hanging out with the high school teams, sharing what the Lord was teaching us and leading worship nights, these kids were deeply impacted. They hadn’t seen people their age live out their faith like this, and it challenged them to do it as well.
I hadn’t ever thought about it that way. It was easy to see SMT as ministry, meeting Haitian and Dominican families and sharing Jesus’s love just by having conversations with them. But this was exactly the same! Being intentional in conversation, talking about faith with these guys, it was ministry too. Ministry is life, and life is ministry 🙂
At the end of the two weeks, it was definitely hard to say goodbye. But we all learned a lot, and I’m excited to see how the Lord uses their lives for His glory.
And now we’re back to SMT, all covid-free :))
This last week has been our favorite so far, driving an hour each day to the mountain community of Guatemala (a village, not the country). We’ve spent the mornings going house to house talking to people for hours on end, and then hanging out with all of the kids we met in the afternoons!
prayer requests ::
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Pastors Robinson, Deoni, and Edwin – that God would continue to work in their churches and communities (and that we’ll be able to go back and work with them again!)
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the people we’ve met (I’ll be sharing more stories and pictures soon 🙂
- our health – there’s been a lot of stomach issues, as well has concussions and sprained ankles, so please be praying our physical health !
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my squad – that we would continue to be unified and finish out strong !
