You have to choose to love people. Your team, your squad, your host, your ministry, everyone. And sometimes that choice is not an easy one. Some days are really hard and you just want to lay in your bunk bed and watch a movie and check out, but some days you meet street boys and girls and all you want to do is give them every bit of love that they deserve and don’t get.
This month, I learned a lot about what ‘choosing in’ meant. We had a camp for street boys and girls where they received hot meals, played in the river, had a bonfire, and were poured into by us and their counselors. But this was only six days of the whole month. We also painted a grocery store (many paint wars resulted), but sometimes we would have four or five days in between where we couldn’t paint because we would run out.
So, where did this leave us? Well, it left us with a lot of time to do farm and property chores and free time. At first we were pretty bummed. You think that you come on the race to always be doing “ministry”; praying over people, feeding the hungry, holding cute babies. And yes, that’s part of the race, but it sure isn’t all of it. What you don’t see is months like this where your free time far outweighs your designated ministry time and it mostly consists of doing chores
But who the heck said that ministry had a start and end time?? Jesus sure didn’t.
In all of our free time, we realized that we could check out and be bummed that we didn’t have a lot of “ministry” or we could use that free time as a blessing and create our own ministry. I learned that ministry doesn’t set when I can love others well. We were able to get so close with our host and his family and with some of the counselors who were our age. I got so close to their 4-year old boy named Gab-Gab (Gabriel) who was basically the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life and the absolute best hugs. We played What Are the Odds (basically a dare game) almost every night with our host which he loved. We would swing, play basketball, hang out with his kids, learn what their favorite foods were, talk about Jesus and what He’s doing in our lives, and so much more. I realized that our ministry never really stops and some of the sweetest moments from this month in the Philippines came when we weren’t actually on ministry hours. We chose to invest in more lives than we had to and to be open to who the Lord what putting on our hearts. The chores we did for most of the mornings that were hot and stinky- we had to feed the pigs- were such a blessing to our host and his family. It gave him a chance to spend more time with his family and just gave him a break – y’all he works SO hard and is the biggest blessing to this ministry.
I learned this month to look at ministry differently and without a limit around it. Think about how much we would have missed out on if we had just worked 9-4 and then checked out for the rest of the day. We would have limited the Lord so much! It was just a really sweet month of seeing how much the Lord can work in our lives and the ones around us when we don’t put Him in a box. L earning how to serve and love people well and with joy is hard sometimes but it’s so worth it.
Thanks for reading! Miss you all!
