“I’m sad that we have to leave this place and these people so soon,” I told my friend Libby on the bus ride to our last day of ministry, “But I’m going to be honest, after today I don’t think I’d have another day of SMT left in me.”
The past two months of working with Mission of Hope here in the DR have consisted of many long and hard days. While I’ve loved getting to build relationships with the people here and have come out of it with some crazy testimonies of the Lord working, by the time our last week came, this ministry had left me physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted. And I admit to thinking “only four more days of ministry, only three more days…” and so on until our final day approached.
I think the thing that really got me with this ministry is the fact that there were honestly so many times where I felt like I wasn’t doing anything. I’m a hands-on person, and I like to be able to see the fruit of what I’m doing. In Costa, that looked like getting to see the stories I wrote show up in English classes and getting to see a stranger we met in dance class turn into a close friend.
But here, there have been so many days where walking from house to house in the humid, Dominican heat and starting conversations with people I might never get to see again left me completely drained. There would be seemingly no fruit to what we were doing that would fill me back up. I felt like I wasn’t making a difference.
So, on our last day, I was a little excited for a couple of reasons. For one, and I hate to admit it, I was a little excited that it was our last day of SMT, simply because of how exhausted I was. But also, we had been in this community before, and my team was planning on visiting a woman we had met towards the beginning of our time here. It had been one of those meetings that I really did see the Lord’s hand work through.
As our group left the church, my team noticed we were going in the opposite direction that this woman’s house was in. So our translator, Lidany, turned our entire group around and headed towards her house. But when we got there, she wasn’t home! Disappointed, we all stood in the middle of the road not knowing what to do.
“We made everyone come here just for us,” Lidany said nervously.
Not sure where to go, we all wandered down the street a little bit until Lidany walked up to an open salon and asked the young woman inside if we could come in and talk with her. We start it off like we normally do, asking her about her family and if she likes her community and so on. Then, she starts talking about the school she went to growing up and how it was run by a missionary family. So I asked her, “Are you a Christian?”
She told us she believed in God, but she wasn’t a Christian. We asked her why.
“Because I can’t follow all the rules,” She replied.
That one exchange opened a floodgate. The spirit started moving immediately, highlighting different people to share different parts of their testimonies. The whole time, the girl in the salon was so engaged and moved by the conversation. She kept asking questions and kept asking more people to share their stories. At the end of it, she told us word for word how our conversation had changed her perspective.
“I used to think all there was to being a Christian was following rules, but now I know that having a relationship with God is what it’s really about.” She said. “Everyone in the Dominican needs to hear this. People here believe in God, but don’t have enough knowledge about who He is.”
That’s when it hit me.
God, I prayed, If all we did was reveal to these people a little bit more of your character, then that was more than enough.
Before we left, my teammate noted excitedly all the coincidences that led to us being in that salon that morning. We weren’t supposed to be there! The girl then told us that she wasn’t supposed to be there that day either, she had come to fill in for her cousin. She also told us that normally the salon was packed, but that day it was empty, allowing us to come in and talk to her.
“There are too many coincidences for it not to be God,” she said.
How true was that?
That divine appointment was just what I needed. No matter how hard the past two months of ministry were, there’s no denying that God was actively moving in each house we entered and working in the hearts of every person we talked to. And if all we did was reveal a bit more of God’s character to a people who needed it, then it was more than enough.
