The Amazon River has been my home for the last two weeks. Aboard the Buen Samaratino with Jorge, our missionary contact here, we slept, ate, showered, worshipped, swam, played, and rested. We were very, very close aboard our boat. 18 girls sleeping literally on top of each other, bug net to bug net. One fan. The boys downstairs in the underbelly of the boat. Mosquitos flying up from underneath. Lots of bugs. Lots of smells. Lots of laughs. Lots learned.
We spent our days doing ministry among the people of the community (called Nauta). We were partnered with a small church of about 35 people and were asked to work with the kids and the youth during our time there. The people were extremely welcoming and the kids, of course, were all over us every moment we stepped off the boat.
We were able to have Fiesta con Dios (VBS) every weekday that we were there. The kids absolutely loved it and we had roughly 150 show up each day. We did dramas, played games, did crafts, sang songs, and chanted to our team cheers. They learned scripture and learned what Christian community looked like.
We also invested a good amount of time into the youth of the church. We had small groups for the guys and girls every day after a short youth service, and tried to really pour into them as much as we could in the short time we were there.
It was hard to leave this community because we felt like there was so much more work there we could have continued in. Our prayer as we walk away from them is that our time there will have spurred on a hunger for more community among the youth, that they would feel empowered to reach out, and that there is a renewed interest in the church among the neighborhood.
Personally, these past two weeks have taught me so much about living in a close community and how to listen for God’s voice among the noise. The noise of people, the noise of boat motors, the noise of kids 24/7, and the noise of my own frustrations and discomforts.
The Lord spoke to me a lot during these weeks. I so needed His strength and His solidarity to walk through each day, and so I found that I actually would sit and wait on Him to fill me up, rather than running out on my own strength. When I did that, He began to really pour into me and overflow onto me.
He started to speak to me not just as His Daughter, but as His Beloved, the one He desires. He taught me that I am in a love relationship with Him. He danced with me and showed me how to open my heart up more to Him. He let me cry on His shoulder as I needed to release things to Him. He spoke to me softly and with loving words.
But He also taught me that often times, when the going gets rough, when I am uncomfortable, tired, hot, and there are people everywhere, that I have to choose joy and that I have to choose to love Him. It is not all going to be the honeymoon stage of Him wooing me and speaking to me tenderly. Sometimes it is going to be hard and I am going to want to choose the easy way, give up, go home, but in this love relationship that goes both ways, I need to choose Him in those times, and that is when I will see His majesty and His glory and see His Kingdom come. It is when we are weak, and when we are suffering, that He uses us the most and builds His Kingdom.
So, it has been a very stretching, difficult, funny, and beautiful couple of weeks. We have seen Jesus in the faces of kids and the youth we were working with. I have looked and seen my team members on several occasions through the eyes of Christ Himself, seen them as He sees them. He has been teaching me how to love, how to persevere, and how to choose joy. And He has been teaching me to buck up and be the warrior for His Kingdom that He has intended me to be.
The Jungle. It was wild. I loved it and hated it at the same time. God definitely used our time there in ways seen and unseen. He taught our squad as we taught the community. He broke us down as we built them up. He united us together and spoke to us individually while we were snappy, sweaty, and unhappy. He is mighty and He is working. He is a good Father and a good teacher. He is our encourager and our lover. He is our strength and our support. And He had to get me out in the middle of the jungle to teach me some things that I wouldn’t let Him teach me otherwise.
It is funny. The longer I am away on this â€Ŕmissionâ€� trip, the more I realize that God was calling me out here to work on my relationship with Him. He is definitely using me here with these people, but He is really using this time to teach me, discipline me, and show me how to fall in love with Him. He’s a tricky fellow.
(PS… We bathed, bathroomed, and washed our dishes all in the same water source…. yes, you guessed it, the Amazon River itself.)
