Way More Than Just a Project

We just arrived for month 10 in La Paz, Bolivia. I am ready for what God has for me here. 

This past month in Chile we stayed in a church in a rough part of the city that puts our “inner city” into a whole new category. We worked with the youth in the area, mainly building relationships with them.

There is a huge population of Colombians where we stayed but they are kind of segregated from the Chileans in their own little neighborhood. They are allowed to purchase a small amount of land and can build their own homes with resources they can find. So you can imagine how some of these homes look. Some families are without fathers or have very little building knowledge, so everything is kind of “it’ll do for now”. 

We didn’t know this until the end of the month, but our host has been feeling like God wants him to reach out to this neighborhood, but it is hard to get a foot in the door there. Well, God works in great ways! While we were there, we learned of a woman in that Colombian neighborhood named Yadira who had a really bad leak in her rook that would pour onto her bed whenever it rained. We knew God had our team there to help fix that leaky roof.

We spent a week working on her house and getting to know her.

By the end of it all, it was so clear that this was way more than just a fix-it project for our team. This was a doorway into this community as we showed the love of Christ. I got to look back at the beginning of the month and watch God’s plan unfold for our host who has a heart for this community. Yes we only got to reach out to one family there, but that’s her neighborhood and she’s well known there. She can go and share with them what happened.  

While we were there, Yadira and three of her children started coming to the church, checking out this God who used His people to show love to them by fixing her leaky roof. Will you pray for Yadira, that she will accept the gift of salvation, start serving the Lord, and be a “missionary” in her own neighborhood?

So what did I learn this month in Chile? I learned that when you invite the Lord into whatever it is that you are doing, the affects of a project will quickly become way more than just a project.