I want to take a few minutes to rewind back to month 8 and tell you about Argentina. After five flights, four layovers, and four days of traveling from the Philippines to South America, we landed in Buenos Aires, where my team got a few hours of sleep before waking up and hopping on a 23 hour bus ride to Jujuy, Argentina. We got there around 9:30AM the next morning, where we were picked up at the bus station by our hosts, who then informed us that church was at 10:30…luckily that didn’t include us preaching.
We lived with a family and had a taste of home. Ministry included handing out Bibles to kids at schools, street light evangelism, homeless ministry, prison ministry, and children’s ministry. I try to be honest with you, so I have to tell you that Argentina was hard. I can’t pinpoint a specific reason why or what exactly was so difficult, but I struggled through it. I could blame it on eight months of this life, that I was tired or that ministry wasn’t my “thing.” Argentina was cold, especially after coming from seven months of endless summer and sweating. They stay up way later than I like to and often don’t eat dinner until 10PM. Only a couple of people that we met spoke English, but majority didn’t, so we were back to charades and guessing what each other were saying. These things aren’t easy, but the truth is, I think I just lost sight of the goal. I stopped focusing on Jesus, and got caught up in my own thoughts. I was dwelling on the negatives instead of focusing on the positives…like the family we lived with who was so sweet, like the smiles of the kids when we handed them Bibles, like the laughs and love of Christ we got to share with young guys at the prison, like the many laughs and scoops of ice cream shared with my team, like the gorgeous view of mountains surrounding us.
The truth is, Argentina was one of my least favorite months of the race. I questioned if I had even grown at all, if I’ve learned anything on the race, if I’ve changed, and what the heck I was doing there. But as I was reflecting on the month, one of my teammates pointed out that you have to pull an arrow backwards in order to shoot it forward, so rather than continuing to dwell on the negative that maybe I did take a few steps back last month, choosing to let God use that to shoot me forward even further and faster than before. I’ve still got a little over two months left on the race (side-note, when the heck did that happen?!), and I don’t want to waste a day of it.
This month I’m in Chile and I have to say, I love it here. This month has been a favorite, and God is teaching me a lot, but I’ll save that for my next blog.
