Often times, we have things planned out perfectly. Plans for the future and they sometimes don’t work out. The quote is true, when it rains, it down pours. This was our squad on travel day. We had all of our bus tickets lined up, hostel booked and our hosts informed however, we found our travel day to be triple in the amount of hours it should have took, stuck on the side of the road in the number one murder capital of the world and our bags that hold everything we own and live on, somewhere on the side of the road in Honduras……without our knowledge. Things just kept happening that made our travel day longer and longer but, at the end of the day The Lord took care of us.
It all started when we were getting ready to cross the border from Nicaragua to Honduras. It was a little bit intimidating right before the border of Honduras. There were guys standing in uniforms with huge guns that were literally, the length of their bodies. We saw them waving us down to get us to pull over on the side of the road. They had to check our bus, passports and bags and they ended up having a problem with us. That one problem STILL doesn’t make ANY sense. That problem was: guitars. For some reason, they had the people on our squad with guitars go through a long, long process. They ended up having to fill out paper work, many times. And coincidentally, they would end up losing every paper they had them fill out! It got to the point of me thinking that they were just losing the papers on purpose just to be a pain and for the purpose of wanting us to suffer, in the blazing sun. Let me remind you, we are basically in a school bus with 50 people and also, 100 bags that are equivalent to the size and weight of 50 more people. It was around 90 degrees outside and of course, there is no air conditioning. Trying to keep good spirits with limited resources to food and water and looking like we just took a shower from the amount of sweat seeping out of our pours, we made it a point to make the best out of our situation. I truly am thankful for The O Squad because even during that time we could have made things even more miserable by complaining and being stressed but, we still made it a point to praise Jesus. We know that we have a responsibility in the body of Christ, each day regardless of the circumstances. It’s about making that daily decision to live like Christ. Even though we were no longer doing door to door in Nicaragua where we had the opportunity to share the gospel to villages that have never heard of Jesus before, we knew we still had to live out our daily lives in love and obedience to God. That day of traveling to Honduras was a test. After about 5 hours of waiting in the sun we were able to leave. During those 5 hours of waiting, beautifully things had happened. We were able to bond together as a squad even more than ever before and also, they had a worship session inside while waiting for their paper work to be finalized. The Holy Spirit was moving so much in that place, that they had people in tears. Things like this would have never happened if it weren’t for these inconvenience circumstances.
It was time to continue on to the border, we had a quick prayer session in hopes that the border would go a lot smoother. We all piled on the bus and drove no longer than 5 minutes to get off again and have our passports stamped. Praise Jesus that everything went smoothly. It still toke a decent amount of time for each one of our squad mates to get their passports approved and stamped but, things couldn’t have went more perfectly. It took about an hour and a half and we all piled on the bus again. Yipee, we were in Honduras and we were all excited to finally, be on our way to our different ministry sites. The way it works is we all travel together as a squad each month and then, after we get to that country, each team ( 6-7 people) disperse all over the country to their given ministry site. Our teams ministry site was 8 hours away from the capital, where we all disperse from. Since, it was 8 hours away we decided to stay overnight in the capital at a hostel where we could get some rest before traveling again. In excitement, we thought we had the rest of the day clear. We passed the border, got our passports checked and stamped, what else could possibly go wrong. Well about an hour after the border crossing, there was a police station that seems to be checking every bus that passed. We get signaled in again to stop and get checked. We pull over and we are all hoping that this is just a quick check and we can be on our way to traveling again. We had about 2 hours left until we reached the capital, Tegucigalpa. Well, turns out when we stopped, something else stopped. Unfortunately, it was our bus. Something had snapped where the engine was and it was leaking everywhere. Picture below of our broken down, luxury bus.
We ended up waiting there again, hours upon hours. Our bus driver tried going to the auto parts store but all of the stores were closed at this point. We left around 6:30am and by this time it was past 7:00pm. If we learned one thing by this point, it was: we will proclaim the rule of Christ, through us and over every situation that we are facing.
We ended up having to wait at the police station until around midnight for another bus to come pick us up. Thank the Lord, for his provisions because with being in such a dangerous country we ended up breaking down at night, out of all places we were at a police station, where we were able to feel secure. People were sleeping on the road, getting to know everyone a bit better, just talking and playing games with each other.
When the bus finally arrived, we were able to get to the hostel safe and sound around 3:30am. My team and I had just around 3 hours of sleep until we had to go travel, yet again. We were able to refresh with showers and most importantly, refill on safe drinking water, Thank you Lord! Our taxis were supposed to meet us at the hostel around 6:30am in the morning so we could make the next bus to where we are staying now- Santa Rosa de Copan. By taxis for the six of us, we figured we needed three because each one of us has two bags. One is basically the size of a human (70 Liters) and the other is our daypack which we keep all of our necessary things for the day in. For example: water, food, passports, books for the bus, ect. and we also, figured it would be safe for us to travel in pairs. Well, turns out they came prepared for us with, one taxi. This taxi, was one of my old cars back at home, a tiny little thing… a ford focus. They said that our only option was to split up and wait for that one taxi to drive there and come back for the rest of us. Well, that was not an option for us because we would then, miss the bus to Santa Rosa de Copan and have to stay in Tegucigalpa another night and be late for our ministry work day. We were able to fit in all of our bags and 6 people all in to that car. It was a tight squeeze but we did it and we were able to arrive and get on the bus on time.
Now, that we definitely thought we were on our way to our ministry site and nothing else could go wrong, it did. We had around 8 hours to get to our ministry site and it turned into 13 hours. When we packed our bags we had to put them beneath the bus, we were weaving through all these turns in the mountains, going back and forth and we suddenly, came to a complete stop in the middle of nowhere. The co-pilot runs out in a hurry and the bus starts going backwards on the road. We had no idea what was happening until we see the co-pilot signal with his hands “it was a huge bag”. We look at the back of the bus and the door to the bus where the bags were, was wide open! We start to panic and this old, broken down truck comes up next to the bus and has two of our bags in the back. The Lord was looking out for us because our host told us that there is major problem in Honduras with pick-pocketing, stealing. So when we told her, she was surprised, completely that we got our bags back. They could have easily, just ran off with them and honestly, I was surprised that the truck was following us for that long. They could have easily, just say this is too much of a hassle and turn around. God Bless that Man! The rest of our bags were on the bus safely. We continued on with our journey and was able to arrive at our ministry site around 7:30pm. We will continue to pronounce the blessing that The Lord gave us on this travel day. He was looking out for us, he kept us and our bags safe and he gave us opportunities to connect more with the people on our squad.
This month we are working with a ministry called Legacy Of Hope. Their mission is to restore hope to children and families in crisis situations and help them experience the unconditional love of Jesus Christ. They are able to defend children and preserve families by having family-based care, restoring empowerment and pursuing excellence in all things. They currently have 22 children and all have heart-breaking stories. This past week they received a new baby. She is just a couple months old, she was dropped off at a cemetery. Lord knows how long she was there, because she was found with terrible diaper rash, a yeast infection in her mouth and had ants crawling all over her. They are able to provide a loving home to sad, sad stories like this one.
Prayer requests:
-Our team has been facing a lot of sickness. Please pray for better health.
-With Christmas just around the corner, we will all be missing our families. Please pray for continued strength and perseverance to keep our eyes focused on what really matters.
-Fundraising, I still have about $3,500 to raise. Please prayerfully consider on donating. This can be done at the top of my page. It is tax- deductible.
Thank you for reading 🙂
