5:32am I wake up from a call on my cell phone.
“Hola es Pastor. Kat, esta bien?” (Hello, this is Pastor, Kat is everything
ok?)
“Si, si!” (In my no-I-wasn’t-sleeping voice.)
I hang up and think… what could possibly not be ok at 5:30 in the morning???
I don’t even remember getting up out of bed and I must have been in a haze since I didn’t have shoes on.
I never walk around this church without shoes.
I get halfway down the length of our room, which is a tarped off area in the building and I start to feel water under my foot. I get startled but since I am basically sleep walking, I keep walking.
Splash, splash, splash, SPLLLLASSHHHHH.
I am now awake. What I thought was a strange puddle was actually a river of water flooding our building. It was only day two of being here and I wasn’t even sure where the light switch was yet. I immediately start yelling, “Girls! Girls! Get up! It’s flooding, there is a ton a water. GET UP, I CAN’T FIND THE LIGHT SWITCH!”
(This is now an ongoing inside joke on team Relentless, and they will often bust out yelling, “Girls! Girls! Get up!”)
Once one of the girls turned on the light switch we found that it had been down-pouring and the entire roof was leaking. Holes everywhere. Everywhere. We quickly moved our stuff out of that area to find dry ground. I didn’t wake up to the monsoon because I had my ear plugs in all night since this IS The World Race. : ) Community sleeping gets tricky.
The next night it did the same thing. When I lifted up my bed to move it, I found an army of bugs under it, sprayed it with bleach and zombie-walked out of the room. We moved everything into the sanctuary and if we were lucky we found a spot where rain wasn’t dripping. I wasn’t lucky that night. I moved about 3 different times and finally resolved to just put the blanket over me even though it was 100 degrees. The blanket stopped me from feeling water drip on my feet and calves. So I slept. Or whatever you want to call it. I also found high ground to avoid any
flooding. (AKA, a stage)
I woke up in a puddle of my own sweat and slowly stood up to take a shower. – On the contrary… we had no running water today and we had no reserve. –
The night after that we got flooded again but this time a pipe was leaking from the kitchen area into our room. We slept in the sanctuary again which was great since it didn’t rain. That
morning we woke up to something moving on the floor. It was a bat. The bat was clearly active during the night seeing as its body was on one side of a bed and it’s wing on the other. The
overhead fans got the best of him.
I could go on and tell stories about how trying to change clothes is like ripping bandaids off my skin or how baby powder is my new perfume or how the electricity went out during church
and all 8 of us had our headlamps under our chairs so we came to the rescue. I could tell you about how we were told to give a Salvation message to a group of people when none of us know Spanish fluently or that well at all. OR I could tell you about how we were told to play a soccer game on their full sized soccer field against Hondurans and we won 3 to 1 by the power of the Holy Spirit! Actually, I could also go into detail about how when we pour water in the toilet to flush, the pipe that the “stuff” goes down is exposed by a hole in the floor… but then this blog would be too long and let’s be honest, way to descriptive for most of you.
It is crazy to think that I have only been in Honduras for about 2 weeks because I feel like I have been here for years! We have had so many up and downs but praise God that every “down” becomes an “up” when we choose to have eternal eyes. My eternal eyes were struggling to adjust to this month. The first two or three days were insane. I was broken, vulnerable, and not to mention just plain annoyed. Which is quite hilarious since I knew what I was getting myself into when I applied to Squad Lead, but this month was shooting me into flash backs of my month 4 in 2011 in Mozambique which is still to this day, the hardest month I have lived. Which made me crippled the first two days.
Day three, I knew that I had to move to action and intercede for this place, for this month, for my girls I am leading, and even for myself. I was not going to have a repeat of my month in
Mozambique. I was not going to let the girls follow my lead of siting on my bucket and pouting.
I can truly say I can’t think of a time in life that I have prayed so consistently all day. I have been studying David in the Bible and how he was used by God because of his brokenness, because of him living poor in spirit. I am here and I am broken, and through that, God has been using me and pulling me closer into intimacy with Him. The team is walking into beautiful new
seasons and walking out of bondage and struggles, it is inspiring to see. I feel as though God has supernaturally put my normal struggles on hold to be a strong tower for the girls on this team. I have this strange sense of peace through the difficult days.
This place and this month was not beyond restoration and neither are you. If you are reading this, please see that at no point in your life will God ever turn His head away from you and say, “You are a lost cause…” You are never a lost cause. You live FOR A CAUSE, FOR A UNIQUE PURPOSE. Believe it and know that God is a God of redemption no matter what place in life you are. No matter what struggle entangles you. You can STILL be unentangled. You become unentangled when you let God undo the knots. When you stop trying to control your own life. Your life is precious and worth Christ’s blood. You were and are and WILL ALWAYS BE worth it. My prayer for you is that you unclench your hands, you pray to a heart tender to God’s loving words toward you.
I wanted to share this vision/metaphor I got from God about the leaky roof we live under. I love metaphors and that is often how God speaks to me, so I hope you follow along. : )
(The roof being our lives/souls, and the holes being the things that entangle us.)
This month God is raining on our lives, he is showing us the
leaks in our mind, our hearts, and our actions. He is gracious in
showing us where we need mending to truly walk out in his will
for us. To walk out as one Spirit with Christ. Often times in life
we know something is missing or we feel as though something
is not on track with our walk with God but we can’t see it, we
can’t put it into words. And some other times, we think
everything is great but really, we have cracks and holes in our
life that we can’t distinguish. Only when it rains do we
acknowledge that there may be holes in our roof. That
something is not secure. We start to feel water dripping on us.
Almost as if Christ is tapping us on the shoulders. If we are
sleeping, we do not feel the rain right away and by the time we
wake up it is flooded. The flood is what shakes us into action.
We get mad, our things get wet and ruined, we have to move
our stuff out of the way, and then we can’t even go back to
sleep. We are consumed by the flood. At first the flood is seen
as a bad thing, but if we examine closely, the flood is made of
living water. The living waters are the very thing that moves us
to allow God to transform our lives and never thirst again. It is
sanctification. When leaks happen, we are so quick to fix them
on our a actual roof once we know we have them. But it is only
when it is day time, and we look up, do we see the light
popping out of the holes.(especially on the metal roof we live
under!) The light shows us just where to fix the roof.
