Sometimes on the Race, you have ministry assignments that you aren’t in love with and the Lord uses those to teach you lessons. Honduras was a tough month to start out with. I was still recovering and finally got to feeling more like myself. For the first two weeks, we were with one family in Gracias, Lemipira. We went to te village for ministry each day during the week. One the weekends and in the evenings, we helped with projects around the house and with taking care of the kids. Our ministry in the villages was good. We rode up the mountain everyday and went door to door talking to people. The people we met had no electricity and lived very simply. It was refreshing to see the mountains all around us and the simplicity of life. It was also very easy to see the hopelessness in the people who worked all day long and were just getting by and never left the mountaintop. We saw people with riches, meaning that they had a flourishing coffee business with many coffee fields. Then on the completely opposite side of things, we saw women with children that they could not feed. One woman that we met lived in a hut that was smaller than my bedroom. She had one single bed for everyone (her boyfriend and three children) to sleep on. She was lonely and her boyfriend moved her away from her family. She was all alone with her kids while her boyfriend was at work. Her kids were hungry and one was sick from the lack of ventilation when she was cooking. There were other women as young as 15 married with children. But I also got to see the hospitality that was offered. We went into homes and invested in their lives. We made tortillas, did laundry, and learned about their farming techniques. Somewhere in the midst of the two weeks, I began feeling as though some of our ministry was mundane. It was easy to get caught up in what we couldn’t do and began to wonder if what we were doing was doing any good. It was a little easy to want to slack off, but God spoke so clearly Colossians 3:23-24 to me.
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”
No matter what we are doing and how we are feeling, everything needs to be done for the glory of God. I found that when that is your attitude, it is so much easier to serve because you are not looking for praise from people and you are not looking at what you are doing because everything you are doing is for Christ alone. With that mindset, God can do so much more through us. It is so humbling. I makes even the littlest thing worth it. Going through the month with this in mind allowed me to see so much of God and His character.
The last two weeks of the month we were with a different family in Santa Rosa de Copan, Lempira. They have 12 children and 7 of them are a part of a ministry they started in Honduras. They foster abandoned children. They have a wonderful staff of 5 people with a couple of night workers. While we were there, they let their staff go on vacation for a little over a week. We became their staff. We had 6 beautiful babies and a 3 year old to take care of during the day as well as helping with household chores. I became the night worker, waking up to feed, change and cuddle the babies in the nursery during the night. I loved it. One could easily become distracted by the monotony of working with babies and thinking that it is not an important ministry, but my whole team worked with the mindset that every single thing we do is for the glory of God and that changes everything.
