When we arrived in Argentina last month, my phone stopped working for a day or two. It wouldn’t turn on and it just had the battery charging symbol for a while. I had planned on getting a SIM card in Mendoza, but God made it very clear early on that I wasn’t supposed to have one. Eventually my phone turned on, and I used it for normal stuff, I just didn’t get a SIM card.
Getting to Antofagasta, Chile was quite the adventure. As a Squad, we took a 9 hour bus from Mendoza, Argentina to Santiago, Chile. When my team arrived in Santiago, Katie (my Team Leader), Jessie (our team’s treasurer), and Marilyn (one of our fluent Spanish speakers) went on a search to find our next set of bus tickets to Antofagasta.
They came back with two options: to leave at 7:30 pm or to leave at 10:30 pm. If we went with the 7:30 bus, we would only have to wait three hours to leave, but we would be spread out, sitting next to people we didn’t know. If we waited the extra three hours to leave at 10:30, all six of us could sit together, and we could sit in the bougie section of the bus. We decided to wait the extra few hours so that we could all sit together and have comfortable seats.
To kill time, we got dinner, watched some Netflix, I read a book. A few of us got frozen yogurt and a few of us also got SIM cards in our waiting as well.
I came to the conclusion that since I didn’t have a SIM card or constant WiFi last month in Mendoza, that I could go ahead and have one this month. It was only $2.81, what could it hurt?
Having my SIM was great while we sat in the bus station and at first on the bus to entertain myself a little. Then we drove out of the city, into the desert where we lost signal for most of the 20 hour bus ride to Antofagasta.
When we arrived in Antofagasta around 6 pm on Saturday, we went straight to youth group, had dinner and went to our houses where we would stay for the first week. Sunday morning, we had our 7 minute walk to church at 10:30, with the sermon starting at 1:15.
After church last Sunday, my phone died, but this time it didn’t turn back on right away. I expected it to do the same thing it had done the month before, where it would turn back on after a day or so, and then everything would be fine. But it didn’t turn back on.
And it still didn’t turn back on. And I kept on waiting and it continued to be dead.
I began to be full of frustration because there were so many things that I depended on my phone for: music, a map, checking my bank account, talking to family and friends. All the things.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that my laptop charger died in Mendoza too, so I literally had no way to do any of these things.
Thursday rolled around and we had team check ins. To explain myself a little better, I am a verbal processor, so I didn’t realize how frustrated I was until I started talking it out.
Throughout the week, I realized just how much I depend on technology, even when I just want to listen to a sermon. What I also learned is that I had been asking God for a greater dependence on Him and for a greater desire to read the Word, but I hadn’t been doing anything about it.
In reality I was fasting from my phone without realizing that I needed it. Every time I would have normally been on social media or playing a game, I was reading my Bible instead. I completely finished reading Exodus, which is something I had tried to do two or three times in my life, but never succeeded.
Also, during this week, we spent a ton of time with the teens and young adults from the church that we met the first night when we arrived. They are some of the sweetest people I’ve met on the Race (I know I keep saying that, but God keeps outdoing Himself with the people we’ve met). Saturday night when we got to Antofagasta, we had just been on a bus for 30 hours, but I haven’t had that much energy to do ministry in a long time solely because I was hanging out with teenagers.
This week, our team has been split in half for housing, and I have been living with Marilyn and Liv. We are about 7 minutes from the church, and the other half of the team is 2 or 3 minutes from the church. One night after an event at church, all of the teens walked us home. It was one of the sweetest moments of the month and also of the Race so far. It has been so cool to see their desire to get to know us while we’re here and I love getting to love them for the short time we’re here.
My heart has always been for teens and young adults, and the Lord has blessed me with sweet moments like this throughout the Race.
Yesterday was a day full of ministry with the teens and I loved my life. We started the morning with evangelism training for the teens, and then went straight to the Bible Olympics.
The Bible Olympics were an adventure in themselves being completely in Spanish. Towards the end, they had the teens and three Americans participate, with only one of the Americans able to speak Spanish.
I got to do an egg spoon race (I’m sure there’s a real name, but I can’t remember), after we answered our question. Not sure I wanna know who had that spoon in their mouth first.
After we answered our question and played our game, we ventured through the nations through food. The Bible Olympics were followed by a food event that sponsored missionaries all over the world. There was food from Mexico, Perú, Cameroon, and others, each helping to support missionaries in that particular country. The teens from our church this month were selling food from Chile.
As we were getting ready to leave, we asked the teens if they wanted to meet us at the church to go out for ice cream at McDonald’s. We ventured back to the church by bus, and waited for the teens to meet us there. Just when we thought they might not come, around the corner comes our host’s orange car full of teenage boys. We started walking to McDonald’s and met up the with girls on our way. As we waited to meet the girls, we walked past the soccer stadium by our house, and I got to watch some of the soccer game (literally a dream of mine since Month 3 in Togo)!
We spent a few hours with the teens eating ice cream, at a festival and at the park. At the end of the night, we walked back home, and the guys dropped us all off at our own houses before heading home.
This morning, in thinking about not having a working phone for a week, I realized what the Lord was teaching me. If I had my phone all week, I wouldn’t have been nearly as intentional about getting to know everyone from the church. I needed to not have phone all week to love them well and be loved by them.
I needed to not have a phone to spend more time in the Bible than I had in a long time. My desire is exponential.
What a week.
