In a small rural town where chickens walk through the road right in front of you, the coffee shop is a lady´s house that you go to get a cup of coffee from and then sit down with her to watch Spanish soap operas, the convienence stores and food stands are literally people´s front rooms where they invite you into their house, and the little 3 wheel taxi drives past a person riding up the street on a house driving cattle down the middle of the street, Palacaguina, Nicaragua, is my home for the month.
Our whole squad is together this month, staying inside a big open building, that back in the States would look like a warehouse with a stage, but here this is one of the local churches in the town. The girls take cold shower at the church, and the guys walk across the street for the bathroom and cold shower at the pastor´s house, while the women there are outside cooking our meals all day long over a mud-brick stove, and washing dishes and hand washing laundry at the outdoor sink.
Although the whole squad is here, the different teams go with different pastors from different churches of different denominations here who have partnered together (How I would love to see this kind of brotherly partnership and cooperation among churches back home, not just of the same denomination but of different denominations all under Christ!).
My team, along with a couple others, have been working a lot of hard construction this month. We have been buillding a cafeteria and a church about 20 kilometers away, and later this month we will be helping to build a house for a family. Unlike construction in the States, here everyone does everything. So so far we´ve been breaking ground, masonry, etc., all by hand with pick axes, breaker bars, shovels, and wheel barrels.
But moreso that just the manual labor of construction, God has been doing a lot of construction on my heart. He has been breaking down walls, chopping up hard ground and rock, digging up deep roots of things that I thought had long ago been cut out, and establishing His firm foundation to build on in me.
Manual labor and construction is not my strong suit, nor is it really the type of ministry that I really enjoy. I would much rather be dealing with people in more discipleship ministry, pastoral care, etc. It´s hard for me to catch vision of what we are doing and the the eternal kingdom purposes for it, but I know God has called me to the World Race for His purposes in ministry, so I don´t need to ¨catch vision¨ for it. I´ve been in groups where it´s all about trying to ¨cast vision.¨ I´ve realized it´s not about that. For me, I know this is God´s ministry that He has called me to, and I am following Him in that. It´s just about serving God, obeying Him, and working hard for Him.
But more so than that, I´ve begun to realise that some of the major things God is and will continue to be doing in my life over this next year is uprooting my insecurities, insecurities that I didn´t even necessarily realized where there but are deep rooted in my life and have affected me in more ways that I realized, and speaking into my identity—my identity as a man, and my identity as a son of the Living God.
I don´t know what this process is going to look like, but I am so excited for the work God is doing in my, and how at the end of this difficult process, I will walk away secure and confident in God and who He has created me to be.
