A few days ago my teammates and I sat in the living room of our little base here in Peru. We were discussing what it looked like to truly ministry to people. The host we were supposed to work with ended up in the hospital, leaving us without a ministry plan. We now had to figure out our own plan for reaching the people of Peru.
Our leader Andy had been reaching into his pocket of people, trying to find ways we can pour into people. He got off his phone and said something along the lines off, “I found a Christian school that would like us to do their chapel service tomorrow morning.” I’m not sure why but as soon as I heard that I knew I had a message to share. God gave me words to say and a message to share so I quickly volunteered.
The next morning my teammates and I hopped on a bus and headed out towards this school. We didn’t get very far before we ran into an absurd amount of traffic. We were packed into some of Lima’s worst rush hour traffic literally averaging 5 kilometers an hour. For reference people run 5ks in about 20 minutes. It didn’t take long before we knew we were going to be late. However no one suspected it would take us two hours to find this school.
As we neared the school, and the end of our bus ride we had to switch up buses, and we were getting a little confused. No one in our group had been to this school before, and we honestly didn’t quite know where to get off. While we were trying to confirm we were on the right bus going the right way a man boarded the bus.
That’s not surprising as lots of people board public buses. However, this man spoke perfect English and happened to engage one of my teammates. They got chatting and to our surprise he just so happened to have worked at this school for 15 years. And, he even had the freetime to personally lead us to the school. With that invaluable help we arrived only 15 minutes late. When we got there the youth had just done some worship and were watching a short video on what the World Race was. We had made it there just in time to speak.
Perfect! In that hectic morning I had never once thought about what I was going to say, and now without the chance to ever sit down or even hardly say “hi” I was on. I preached the most unprepared message probably in the history of school chapels. I felt like I had a message from God, but that I was failing to do it justice.
However, I didn’t have time to think negative, or really at all, because, there was a second service just a couple minutes later. My team prepared as best they could, and I tried to get my thoughts together. I felt only slightly more prepared than the first service, when I gave a similar message. I felt this word so clearly given by God just the night before was ruined because I didn’t prepare enough.Then a high school aged girl came up to me and said something that shocked me.
She said, “I want to thank you. That message you gave was sent from God. It seemed like you were talking directly to me and where I was at. You’ve encouraged me, and I had to come thank you.”
Ok that’s kinda abbreviated as she went more into depth with her story, but I don’t have room for that in a brief blog post. Either way I was shocked. In that moment God taught me some valuable lessons.
