We could hear the rumble and ruckus of applause and celebraion the moment we started to walk down from baggage claim and into the terminal to enter Santo Domingo. We stepped through the automatic doors and were greeted with hundreds upon hundreds of people cheering, blow horns in hand and a marching band to boot. Paparazzi cameras were placed at every angle and everyone seemed to be holding up newspaper clippings of some guy named Pedro Martinez. Needless to say, the cheerleaders were not for us.
It’s been one week since then and everything still seems like a blur. I’m currently sitting in my home for the month, a charming one story with 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms complete with running water and electricity (just watch out for the cockroaches). This place is a castle by Race standards and I can’t help but feel a little spoiled with a super market down the street and purified water delivery is just a phone call away. I’m staying here with my team, The Ones on the Rock. There are 7 of us total, each one of us a little more weird and a little more quirky than the next but undeniably amazing. After 7 days of living under the same roof with strangers, a weird thing happens, they start to feel like family.
I could sit here and tell you about the ministry I’ve been doing for the past week like knocking on people’s doors and inviting them to church, and offering prayer to a family who lost their 3 month old baby overnight. I could tell you about the sun setting as we played a rousing game of baseball and soccer with 30 kids on a cow field (cow pies included…bleh) or when 2 sisters invited us into their home to make us cheesy pasta and fried planatnes, a dish traditionally served amoungest close friends. I could tell you about all these things in detail but it still wouldn’t give the full picture to just the amazing story God is writing here in the Dominican Republic.
This story we’ve all been given, this unbelievable God inspired story that each of us wake up to every morning and the choices we make with each day have the capability to radically impact the Kingdom of God. Even here, on The World freakin Race, I find myself in the thought process, “Am I doing enough?” When in reality (and newsflash for those still trying to figure it out) it’s not about you or me or what we can do to make our lives better, it’s about what you are doing to make the story of God better. And by that I mean, how are you living your life to celebrate and love those around you so that it is so evident that God is in you? In Donald Millers book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, he writes “It is when people do not allow God to show up through them that the world collapses on itself.” We as believers have a major role to play each day, to love and serve and to show the beauty of Christ, it’s a lesson I’m currently in the process of learning.
I keep coming back to this thought, the celebration of life. That every morning when we wake up, and every day that we step outside our doors we can celebrate and change lives and radiate the love that Jesus first showed us. I like to imagine that God has a cheering section for us, a crowd filled with angels and trumpets (complete with a marching band of course) every time we turn on our cars andstory do our days work. That He celebrates us and our lives because He knows that it’s another day to write a page in our story with the choices we make and the good news is…we don’t have to do it on our own.
Off to sign headshots –
M
