Dear mom,
Skip to the second paragraph.
“Here are the safety protocols for next month: Honduras is the poorest country we are going to. The crime rate is the highest. Hide your money and passport away under your clothes. It is also the highest for malaria, so make sure you’re taking your medicine. Last thing: there is a thing in the country where two men on a motorcycle rob people at gunpoint, so be on the lookout for that.”
Month two was over, and we loaded our backpacks onto the chicken bus at three thirty in the morning to head out of our little mountain village to Guatemala City where we loaded onto another bus for fifteen hours to Tegucigalpa, Honduras where we spent the night in a hostel, woke up, took a van to the bus station, took another five hour bus ride to Progresso, Honduras where we met our ministry contact and loaded up into the bed of a truck for a thirty minute ride to home sweet home in Urraco, Honduras- keeping our eyes peeled for the two men on a motorcycle along the way. (especially after a squad leader had her purse cut open and phone stolen on a bus during month two)
Oh travel days.
We arrive at our humble abode which is the church. It’s a one-roomed warehouse with lime green walls and tarps hanging from the ceiling to create a bedroom for us. Women and children run to the entrance to greet us. There’s a handmade welcome sign on the wall for us with a basket full of Latino candy and dinner waiting for us.
Our pastor: “Ronny” sits down to run through the schedule with us. Our days start at 7 and sometimes end as late as 9:30 filled with teaching English classes, feeding programs, remodeling the church, painting murals, etc.
We settle into our beds and go to sleep until our alarm goes off…
…that alarm being our team leader, Kat.
“GIRLS GIRLS GET UP NOW! THE WHOLE PLACE IS FLOODED!”
I roll over still groggy but soaked in the corner by the drain pipe with a damp mattress- legs infested with bug bites and a community of ants near my pillow. We’ve also had other visitors in our common area- meaning outside of the tarp like a frog and a bat.
We have water every other day and take bucket showers. I am currently typing this in the pitch dark, because our electricity has gone out.
Also, this morning, our teammate Mollie woke up to sewage drainage and poop all over her bed.
This is just a stopping point for us, but it’s the everyday reality of the people here who beam with warmth, gratitude and hospitality.
This is a month where my team and I have been stripped bare. There is so much to be grateful for and so much beauty that surrounds, but our everyday comforts that so easily distract us from places of pain that we need to work through are gone.
Everything boils down to God, ourselves and gaping wounds from the past that we have ignored for so long. Healing makes you raw. It drapes a curtain between you and the thousands of beautiful things around you. It makes you temporarily forget how far you have come and how far you can go. It makes you press into the faith that anything is possible even if in the very moment it seems impossible.
But it’s always good. Healing happens little by little. It’s like walking a journey in hot weather and taking off layers of fur coats little by little.
Little by little you can breathe more easily.
Little by little you feel lighter.
Little by little you can walk in more confidence.
One night, sitting around the dinner table, Kat said something so profound and life giving:
“I feel like The Lord is telling me that He is doing in us what the rain does with the roof- it exposes our leaks. He is going into the places where we need to heal, and he is exposing them and making them whole again.”
When the rain comes in, it makes us cold, wet and miserable…but it shows what needs to be fixed. It calls attention to the broken places.
We are stripped bare but covered, raw but healing, shaken but not stirred, and in the meantime, we are feeding the multitudes despite our broken places.
And those broken places- the leaks are healing
One by one.
