After a whirlwind of three weeks at home with the family, Chris and I left on July 3 to meet up with our team in Panama for our last month on the World Race!
We arrived in the airport in Panama City, Panama about 1AM on July 4 and we slept on some chairs in the airport waiting for our team to meet us at around 7AM. They arrived and we spent the day touring Panama City. We got to see ships traveling though the Panama Canal and we went to some markets and things in the city. It was a great welcome back to the Race.
Overall we had a great time in Panama! We worked with a church, called Lighthouse Church in Volcan, Panama. We spent the month traveling around to schools, prisons, youth detention centers, orphanages and homes for the elderly putting on programs that included presentations of the gospel. We worked long hours and were very exhausted by the end of our time there.
One of my favorite experiences of the month was spent at the youth detention center. We went there 2 times and each time we had an audience of about 30 boys (ages 17-21). They had each committed some sort of crime that put them in this detention center and I would describe the detention center as being quite a rough place, so it was kind of a rough and tough crowd of boys. The first time that we were there we played a game similar to hot potato, but with different foods. Music was playing and if the food item landed in your hands when the music stopped then you had to take a bite of the food. It was so much fun to see the boys bonding over this game and cheering for each other when the raw eggplant landed in one boys hands and he had to eat it.
The first time that we were there, we did some skits, gave testimonies and presented the gospel, and 24 boys stood up and declared that day that they wanted to be Christ followers! It was such a cool experience to see these tough teenagers stand up in front of their peers and choose Christ!
The second time that we went to the detention center, we had a similar crowd so at the end of our program we had a question and answer session where we handed out pieces of paper and the boys each wrote down a question to ask us. The questions could have been about anything, our 11 month trip around the world, our lives in America, ANYTHING, but they asked us questions about God such as, “How do I know that I’m ready to accept Christ as my Savior,” “I feel stuck in a life of sin, even after I accept Christ as my savior, how do I get out of the routine of sinful things in my life,” “What is the next step for me after accepting Christ as my Savior?” It was very cool to experience Christ working through our feeble efforts of presenting the gospel and loving these boys in the detention center.
After Panama, we spent a few days at our final debrief in Costa Rica. We had a great time bonding with our squad-mates and saying our goodbyes to the family that we had developed in the past 11 months!
That concluded our race! We are now at home (well, in Muskegon with our parents) and waiting patiently to see what God has planned for our next step!
