The very first night of my first ministry, I accidentally locked my team outside of the house and we had to spend the night in the garage/church. My teammate locked herself in her room accidentally after the lock broke and I had to climb over the door to remove the hinges to free her. We drained our water source within 3 days. Our rigged clothesline broke and dropped all of the freshly cleaned clothes in the sandy Peruvian dirt. I forgot my passport. We attempted to teach a VBS for 100 rambunctious Peruvian children without knowing their language. Broke the water pump, cut the inside water line, and had the main line blow up twice.
Amidst this chaos, we have been all coping with the absence of the things we treasured most. With everything we used to hide our insecurities stripped away, we have no option but to face ourselves.
I take pride in and put my identity in my work, and the entire first week I didn’t have a job. I felt worthless. Another teammate had prepared herself with a library of movies; none of them worked. Yet another teammate held her American self together quite well until she found a chicken foot floating in her soup.
We have all brought our false self to the table this month, but without the things we hid behind, we are forced ask: “Who are we really?”
The few days we spent in Atlanta showed me that I didn’t “grow” when I left home and moved to Texas, I merely adapted and took on the identity of the community with which I had surrounded myself. With all my community and work taken away from me, I’m faced with a tough question: Who are you, and why?
As rough as this is, I know that this is the first step in the growth process. You can’t build a house on top of a collapsed house, you must clear away all the rubble and start with a clean slate.
“The question is not ‘Who have I become’, but rather, Who has God made me to be?”
