To put things blunt, I have had a HARD time with ministry this month. The fact of having a completely unstructured schedule has been weird for me. I have had to learn how to find the ministry that lies so clearly in front of me.
Before I go further into this, let me tell you something absolutely awesome:
When we got to our ministry site in the Dominican Republic, we walked around the community to see who and what was around us. We found a basketball court just a few minutes down the road that was unfortunately run down.
My team stood there noticing that the community doesn’t have anything else really other than this court. The way the hoop is hanging down? Yeah, they still played with it like that. My team felt as if we should attempt to fix the backboards and hoops for this community. So that’s exactly what we did. We figured out where we could buy stuff to fix the backboards and the rims in town!
And so it started! The coolest thing happened though. When we told one of the locals what we were going to do, he spread the word across the community. Soon, we had many of the older men and the young teenage boys out helping us fix the court!
Watching this all unfold was amazing in itself. Just from our thoughts of helping the community actually brought the community together. THAT is the ministry in itself! The coolest thing happened later that day after we finished!
We were able to play a full-court game! Americans verses Dominicans. We had over 60 people show up to watch! Before this project, a hand full of kids would go out there just to hang out and talk, but now the community can go out and play full games of basketball and just be together!
As I said, the community came together to help. By help, I mean they took over the project. So in the meanwhile, we just sat there because they wanted to do it all. I found this considerably hard seeing as how we had started the project. So I just tried to find ways to do ministry. So………… I found kids!
This little guy is Anderson. I personally think he looks like a baby Steph Curry! The amount of joy this kid carries blows me away. He is always so happy and always ready for a Dragon Ball-Z style fight. He loves tag and arguing over who has more pesos (it’s me but I let him think its him). I have grown to love this kid tremendously and simply want him to experience the love that Christ has to offer him. One day at a time!
So, I started off by saying ministry has been hard for me. This is because I expected to be told what to do by our host. I forgot what the phrase, “Life is Ministry, Ministry is Life”, was all about. Rebuilding a court because you want to love the community and getting blasted away by a little Steph Curry is everything about what ministry looks like. I had to open my eyes and see the ministry sitting right in front of me. I am fulfilled. I am happy.
Joyfully,
Preston
