This month has been All Squad Month in Nicaragua. We started the month at debrief staying in a Hostel in Granada, Nicaragua. There we were able to all reconnect and share stories while having some much needed down time. My fellow female teammates and I took a chocolate making class, went shopping, and ate at some great restaurants. After the better part of a week, we headed across town to our ministry site.
This month our ministry site was a church called “El Puente” which means the bridge. They, along with some friends of theirs, had several different ministries we would be working with all month; 3 manual labor rotations, 2 relational, and the island rotation. Every couple of days 2 teams would head out on a wooden open air boat to Isla Zapatera in the middle of Lake Nicaragua to work with a local pastor to build a church there. There was a mix up with the building permits and we had to stop construction part way through the month, but we still had painting and cleaning and dirt moving that we would be doing instead.
Ironically, the most terror I have faced came while building that church. On our first island rotation, we were charged with the task of leveling out the ground where the floor of the church was to go as it was being built into a hillside. Inside that ground lived a swarm of what I would call tarantulas. (they were a different kind of monstrous spider that looked very much like a tarantula but weren’t). I have a huge phobia. I kept lying to myself saying “they can only be in the trench we dug.” “They cannot get to me up here.” “ they won’t get me if I don’t shovel so I will just push the wheel barrel.” It worked for a while. I was able to function for the first day. The second day everything changed.
The walls I had built up in my head to protect me from them came crashing down when we started busting up the ground I was standing on and the tarantulas were literally surrounding me. I got overwhelmed by fear and anxiety so I just broke down. I started to cry. I tried to hide it, but my team knew I couldn’t handle it (for we had a similar experience a week before, but with only one tarantula). They told me to just head back to the house. They would handle it and explain to the other team what was going on. I felt so bad that I couldn’t help with the work (I kind of like digging), embarrassed that I was crying like a baby, and that I was not strong enough to handle this on my own. Satan attacked me the hardest while I was literally building the church. He knew my buttons and pushed them hard, but he didn’t win. The work of the day still got done, and instead of running away to my own devices I ran to the bible instead. I also had none of my own devices to run to… my ipod was back on the main land and the only thing I had to distract myself from the fear was The Word.
The rest of the month went smoothly. Our hosts have been incredible. One family invited us over for a pool party one evening, and invited me and some of the guys to come over to watch the World Series! (I still wore my Cardinals shirt though I had to root for the Royals.) Last night we had squad worship in the central park/town square area. It was beautiful to worship out in the open with people stopping to watch and ask questions. We got to love on some locals that we might not have gotten to see. Tomorrow morning we are getting on a bus to head to Honduras for the final leg of Central America.
I can’t wait to share with you what we will be doing next month and hopefully it will be in a more timely manner than the past two months have been.
Continue to pray for us and our hosts and that we can make the biggest impact for the Kingdom that we can!
Gracias a Dios.
