Our main ministry this first week in Guatemala has been selling tickets for a fundraiser to buy textbooks for students in rural towns. This sounds easy at first, I mean the tickets are literally only $7, but once we started to actually sell them we had been sadly mistaken. Not only are the tickets too expensive for most of the Guatemalans, but the language barrier makes it even more difficult. On Monday when I left with a few squad mates to sell tickets in the main square of Antigua, fear began pouring over me. Fear of rejection, fear of looking stupid, fear of not knowing Spanish, and to be completely honest fear that this wasn’t even worth it. How could I call selling tickets ministry? Especially when out of my 40 squad mates we had only sold 4 total.
But that’s when I saw her. She was sitting on a park bench with a friend drinking coffee subtly reminding me of my friend’s back home. We began to speak to her, and once we realized she was American too we decided to ask how she had found herself now living in Guatemala. She replied “It is a horrible and long story.” It was something we weren’t expecting at all, but we asked if she would like to share a part of her story with us. She began to open up about how she had married a Guatemalan man and had a beautiful baby girl, but her husband became extremely abusive and now she cannot leave with her daughter to go back home. It was almost unbelievable to hear this.
We held hands with her and began to pray that God would control her entire life and situation. She prayed aloud with us saying how she didn’t feel alone anymore, that she knows Christ brought us to her at that exact moment for this exact reason. Tears streamed down both of our faces.
I had been so stubbornly doubting God. He could care less how many tickets I sold, or that my Spanish was incomprehensible at times. My works are dead without faith in Him to pull through. It was worth it all, because I now have a sister in Christ who knows that she is not alone, even in her darkest hour Jesus shown the brightest. Best part is, it was nothing I did, but Christ in me.
