Well, as of today, I have been in El Salvador for a full week. It’s been a week of constantly changing schedules, introductions to wonderful people, incredible food, brief journeys outside my comfort zone, and the movement of God.
My room for the month!
This month, my team and I are staying in a church just outside the city of San Salvador. We have been blessed with beds, toilets, and showers, so we’re basically in the lap of luxury here. Our hosts are extremely kind and attentive, and their hospitality has been an incredible blessing.
The Church we are staying/ministering in.
The church has services every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, as well as youth services on Wednesday and Saturday, and we have been asked to preach at these services. My teammates have done an amazing job preaching in the church this past week (and I get to preach tomorrow night, so please pray for me).
When we aren’t preaching, we also are teaching English (and learning some Spanish ourselves in the process!). We have one class of young kids, and this week we helped them review their English colors and numbers. We also have a class of young adults, and we helped them improve their already impressive conversational skills.
We have also begun work on a project outside. There is a property next to the church that is going to be a community soccer field, but currently is full of trash, weeds, and trees. On Saturday, we took shovels, rakes, and machetes and began clearing the field. We hope to have it completely cleared by the time we leave. This field is also the site of my first negative experience in El Salvador.
Especially when it comes to manual labor, I can be a bit… accident prone. I wish I had a really cool story to tell you, but what I do have to report is this. I was trying to move a large tree branch, and didn’t notice the ants crawling all over it. Next thing I knew, I had probably twenty ants on my hands. I managed to flick about half of them off before they started biting, but once they did… Oh my goodness, did it sting. Also, my poor left pinky got bit four times and swelled to quite a lot larger than its typical size (But I’m fine now, thanks for asking!).
But that incident, perhaps more than anything else this week, got me thinking. Sometimes, ministering to others requires something of me, even beyond just my time and attention. Sometimes it’s relational, requiring emotional vulnerability or stretching friendships. Sometimes it’s spiritual, requiring me to labor in prayer, or see people falling away from God, despite all my efforts to the contrary. Sometimes it’s physical, requiring blood, or sweat, or tears… or ant bites.
So I guess what I’m saying is ministry sometimes hurts. Sometimes even more than ant bites and swollen pinkies. And ultimately, as long as I’m truly ministering for the sake of the Kingdom of God, it’s completely, 100% worth it.
“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” Romans 8:18-19
Ultimately, what I’m doing, and the One I’m doing it for, are more than enough to make my temporary pain insignificant. So bring on the ants! (Or don’t. I’d be fine with that too).
