Our time In Ecuador has come in gone. (This is my first blog I know, wifi was difficult to come by.) This month has been both rewarding and challenging in its own rights. First, I will be begin with the challenges of this month. To begin this month was all squad month which means that all 50 something of us plus all of our squad leaders and our squad mentor Stacy would be living in the same house. Well except for us men we had the blessing of sleeping in our tents on the front lawn and yes this did turned out to be a blessing as it was quite difficult to find quiet time being constantly around so many people.
Being that there were so many people I found it increasingly difficult to be able to spend alone time with the Lord and focus on the word. I found myself having to be far more intentional and purposefully seek time away from the distractions. In Colombia, it was very easy to be in tuned with the Lord and be able to sit still in order to listen to what he had to say. Not so much in Ecuador. It wasn’t just intimacy with the lord that was also a struggle this month. Trying to find intimacy and build stronger relationships with team/squad mates was also a difficult task. Being around so many people it was easy to keep things superficial or be stretched to thin trying to connect with so many different people, especially those we are not around often.
Ministry this month also presented its fair share of challenges, at least at the beginning. Our primary ministry this month was a soccer ministry and we were told that it was only going to be 6 hrs a week on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. So during the day our host home Casablanca would be our ministry. Fabi and Mabe who were our host parents had a lot of projects that they wanted us to do to so that Casablanca would be a more inviting and accesible to future World Race teams and missionaries. Fabi and Mabe were also part of our ministry themselves as they also lived on the property where we lived and devoted their entire lives to ministry. However they were nothing but a blessing to us but more on that later. The projects that they had laid out for us dealt mainly with manual labor and construction. The main one was to build a rock wall that was to be the back drop of a future outdoor kitchen so they could better serve large groups like ours.
During that first week we spent a lot of time removing the dirt from the wall in order to be able to construct it. All in all we removed about 80 bags of dirt weighing about 100 pounds each. As you could imagine this work was very grueling and tired some. On top of this we were also attending our soccer ministry in the evening. We quickly found out that our work days turned out to be between 15 and 16 hours for those first few days. on top of that our soccer ministry would be expanding. We were left with a tough choice to make, we knew we would burn out quickly if we kept going at the pace we were. So we made the decision to split up. 5 of us would go to the soccer ministry full time as it was our primary ministry and many of us had a sports/ soccer background. Josh our team lead would stay behind at Casablanca to focus on the projects Fabi had planned. While Katy May would alternate between the two. (Josh ended up building almost the entire wall by himself.)
When we first started our soccer ministry it was raining which we soon found out it did almost every day in Quito. Well when it rains nobody shows up to play soccer. The first part of our soccer ministry was playing soccer with the youth soccer program. At a field behind a church that our ministry was partnered with.
The first few days no kids would show up so we ended up just playing soccer with one of the players from the men’s team Cumbre Alta that we worked with at night. Meji who was the coach of the youth program would become one of our closest ministry leaders as well as one of our biggest ministry opportunities. We were told that Meji was a relatively new christian and we spent the majority of our month along side him. So we had the opportunity to disciple with him.
After playing soccer in the afternoon we would head to another field where we would spend the evening along side the Cumbre Alta soccer team, which is a amateur mens soccer team that has the potential to join the professional ranks in Quito. Our job with the mens soccer team was simply to be there (with the exception of Kat who is a Physical Trainer) and to live out the gospel around them.
When we first started working with the soccer I had a bit of a pride moment. At first we struggled to find our place with the soccer team since we were not actually doing anything. For a couple of days there I struggle internally with if I had made the right decision to go with the soccer ministry when there was so much to do back at Casablanca and we really had not yet done anything with either soccer ministry. I can remember early on asking Nate who is the Cumbre Alta coach if there was anything more he would like us to do. Me having a sports background and my degree being sports management I felt like I could plug in more. This is where my pride stepped in. At the beginning of the month I felt the Lord saying to me to submit, however I didn’t fully understand what he meant by that. I soon learned that part of it was submitting to myself and putting myself behind the plans that God had instead of any I could come up with.
I am thankful that I trusted in God’s plan and not mine. Because he was calling us to be not to do. A lot of times in missions we focus on the projects at hand, at least when it comes to shorter term missions. Thus why I struggled with focusing on the projects instead of the relationships that God had planned for us to develop. As I stated earlier, Meji became one of our biggest ministry opportunities as well as other men of the soccer team.
There will be plenty of people who will come to Casablanca and finish the projects that we started, but nothing can replace the relationships that we were able to build.
This month I didn’t attend a single church service, however I saw God nearly everyday. I saw God in the people that he surrounded us with. We came in to Ecuador with the expectations to serve them, but we were served by them instead. Fabi and Mabe treated us like we were 58 of their own kids. They even called us their kids. Every morning we would be awoken and greeted with their kindness and Love. They would prepare all of our meals for us and always put our well being first. Gustavo, who is the Director at Inca Link (The Parent ministry over many of our ministries.) always made it a priority to hug everyone and ask them how their day was. Some of the guys that we played soccer with and that was on the soccer team would end up spending entire weekends with us. These were days that we had off and there was no ministry, however they cared about us so much and enjoyed our company that they would invite us into their home and cooked dinner for us. Each of them showed us their hearts for service and we got to see the visions that Jesus has planted in each of their hearts.
Ecuador will always have a peace of my heart. I will return one day. If it is for a short term or long that is for God to decide.
“Quito la mejor ciudad en el mundo.” -Edgar.
