Hi, friends. 🙂
Happy Tuesday!!
It’s a lovely day here in Bolivia; my team has a real off day today–our first in about two and a half weeks–and we’re so, so grateful for it. I had Lucky Charms for breakfast, a horse-drawn trash cart just rolled down the street outside our hotel, my freshly-laundered clothes kinda smell like meat (or maybe cucumbers, though I can’t quite decide which), and the clouds are as white and puffy as can be…
and it’s all a little different than the March weekdays I’ve been used to, but I’m so happy to enjoy every bit of it. 🙂
So here’s the question:
How is our ministry?!
Is it cliché to say it’s so good?
Even when it’s not perfect, not what we might’ve expected, not as easy or as hard as we might’ve been told, or not what makes us “feel” like we’ve accomplished a lot?
In Ecuador we learned that ministry might officially be to visit and teach and share our testimonies with churches in the area, but that it can also look a lot like going out with members of the church to get froyo, or play “basket” every Sunday, or drive out to a swimming pool and share salchipapas together.
In Peru we saw that ministry for the month doesn’t just look like teaching English to neighborhood kids a few hours every day and decorating classrooms with alphabets and calendar posters, but also like showing the church there we support their ministry by attending their services every night, and like spending time with our fellow squadmates just talking about our torn-up expectations and things we enjoy at home and dreams God’s been putting in our hearts.
And here in Bolivia–here in this beautiful country, ministry’s meant going out to rural communities with a visiting medical team to do small clinics and having half our team play “down by the banks” with the kids twenty times over so their parents can see the doctors in relative peace–and then enjoying meals together prepared by our host pastor and her friends and family, wandering around town with members of the med team taking photos of the parks and tiendas, and taking a couple nights away to stay at their 5-star hotel so we can celebrate with them before they leave for the USA. (SO thankful for amazing group discounts for that last one!)
Oh, and of course…ministry means having our truck get stuck in a torrential Amazon downpour on the way back from a clinic, standing in a goat shelter eating carrots and beef jerky and peanut butter bars together while we waited out the rain, realizing that what had been our road was now a two- to three-feet-deep rapids, helping two of our med team friends build a fire from wet sticks and coloring book pages while we waited for the water to recede, and finally having a tractor come pull out our truck and get us home…and then hearing a visiting pastor who had come with us tell the church that “we were all Rambos” and that he’d learned so much of preparedness and excellent attitudes through what he’d seen of us throughout the day.
I don’t know what we think “ministry” is supposed to look like, but honestly, I think God’s always meant for it to be a lot like all of this.
I think it’s building relationships–just hearing what people want to say, and sharing Oreos with them, and sliding across rainy sidewalks with them–and in doing so, showing them that we see the immeasurable worth of God’s image and likeness in them and really think they’re worth existing and being around.
I think it’s learning to rejoice in our Lord’s wondrous handiwork together as we spend days on a bus watching the mighty ocean coast and rich, red, rocky mountains go by.
And I think it’s striving for and encouraging each other to have a big enough trust in the character and power of God that we’re satisfied with the good works He gives us to walk in every day, and learning to look for His heart in them, no matter how worthy or important or successful they make us feel.
So how’s our ministry?
…really, really good. 🙂
