Time is already flying by. We are nearing the end of our time here in Palenque. In just a couple of days, we will be heading down to Guatemala for a
short time of debriefing as a squad. At
the end of the week, my small team of four (five including Stephanie) will be traveling
even further south into Nicaragua
where we will be living and working for the next five weeks. We are still unsure of what we will be doing,
or what city we will be living in, but we are hoping to be working in the dumps
near Jinotep. Nothing is set in stone
yet, but hopefully we will have everything figured out by next week.
This past week has been a really good week. We had the opportunity to visit with some of
the people from the church and I have really enjoyed hearing their
stories. Miguel invited us to his house
for lunch and we were able to sit and talk to some of them individually and
hear bits of their stories. Noe started this church last year and it has
already grown so much that they no longer fit in the small lot of land that
they have been renting. They are hoping
to buy the land so that they can build a bigger building and continue with
their ministry in that area of town.
We found out on Tuesday that the church is actually located
in one of the worst areas of town. It is
full of gangs, bars, prostitution, and crime and this is the very reason why
Noe wants to keep the church in the same location. He has already reached out so much to this
community and it is neat to hear the stories of the lives that have been
changed.
A couple of my teammates have been spending a lot of time
with a young man named Mario. He usually
rides his bike to the church and hangs around outside unsure of whether or not
he wants to come in. Most of the time he
is high and drunk, and the teardrop tattoo under his eye marks his position in
his gang. By the end of the night he has
sobered up enough to have a decent conversation and it just breaks our hearts
to hear his pain. He talks about wanting
out of the gang and out of the drugs and alcohol but he fears what the gang
will do to him. The other night he even
walked up to the front and wanted prayer. He tried to hide his tears while he was being prayed over but he
couldn’t stop them from running down his face.
Even worse than the fear of leaving the gang, is the pain
and guilt that he hides behind the drugs and alcohol. The teardrop symbolizes that he has killed
someone. I had seen this mark before on
a woman in northern Mexico,
so I knew what it meant, but I was shocked when he had confessed who he had
killed. He had taken the life of a
little girl. Suddenly I lost all my
sympathy and compassion for him. Even
now I’m still struggling with trying to forgive him for that, but I know that I
shouldn’t let it matter. I need to love
him regardless of what he has done.
The point is that it doesn’t matter what anyone has
done. God is a God of compassion and
forgiveness and this covers all of our sins. Not just the ones that aren’t “that bad”. God is also a God of new beginnings and
hopefully Mario will get to the place where he is ready to get out of his
addictions and seek the forgiveness that only comes through God. Please pray for him and for our team when we
see him. We only have a couple of days
left here but the church is committed to reaching out to him.
“For a long time I used to think this a silly,
straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the
man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been
doing this all my life-namely myself. However much I might dislike my own
cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been
the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the
things was that I loved the man.” -C.S. Lewis
