Dear family and friends,
I can’t believe we are now a week away from journeying on to Asia for the next 4 months of our trip. Central America is such a special place to me. I love the culture, the language, the music, the values oriented around close family, and the friendliness here. While we are leaving one of my favorite continents. I am so eager and excited to see what Asia has in store for us. I have no expectations of what we will encounter or what Asia as a whole is like, but I know that God is already there and He is already preparing the way for our squad to enter in and continue our work.
With that being said there are many changes we are about to encounter. In just a few more days, we will all be receiving new teams. Then we will be going to a new continent with new culture and new experiences. While change can create a lot of anxiety, I feel mostly at peace about it, because my experiences have always taught me that growth is always waiting on the other side of change.
This month in Chichicastenango has turned out to be quite challenging for me. Our team dynamics started to shift as soon as we arrived here and every person seemingly began to deal with internal struggles of their own. I think this is a month where I can confidently speak for everyone in saying, we miss home. After speaking to multiple people on both my team and the team we have been with this month, a lot of us have questioned how we are going to make it another 7 months being so far from home and our comforts.
By comforts, I don’t mean the ability to go and buy all the clothes or foods I want. I don’t mean the big comfy bed that is waiting for me when I return. While this month has consisted of ice cold showers, I don’t even speak of having a hot bath to sit in to warm my bones. A lot of people hear the word “abandonment” and instantly think of materialistic things; big fluffy beds, hot water to bathe in, more clothes, many food options, etc. While everyone is different and these could be very realistic and difficult things for some people to give up, for me it is not. For me, giving up comforts mean the peace of mind that comes with being close to family and friends who know and accept me 100% inside and out. By comforts, I mean the freedom to get in my car and just drive … not even to anywhere in particular, but just to be in my own space. By comforts, I mean the freedom to walk around alone in a park with no outside thoughts or opinions other than my own. The blessing it is to be able to sit with my parents and share in conversations about God, life, love and listening to their wisdom about it all. To me, abandonment is about giving up your independence because that is something you cannot buy.
Abandonment is all about embracing community. It is about pressing into uncomfortable moments. It is about humbling yourself before someone else who’s expressing the pain of their pride. It is about fighting for friendships when you feel like you have no fight left in you. It is about gently nudging your community closer towards Christ. It is about allowing yourself to also be nudged closer to Christ. It is about being a listening ear for someone who is struggling despite your own internal battles. It is about restless nights full of self doubt. It is about sitting in your pain with the people who have hurt you during the times you cannot run and hide. It is about taking your fears of rejection, failure and unworthiness to the Lord. It is about letting God come in and work in the pain you are still holding onto from the past. It is about dying to the flesh and practicing self-control not only daily, but multiple times a day when others offend you. It is about overcoming your desire to be alone, because alone does not exist on the world race.
Something I have really learned this month is how to sit in my pain. To me, sitting in pain is like sitting in soiled pants. It is the most physically uncomfortable thing.
Last week we played a game of soccer here with our ministry host’s wife and some of the cooks. Latinas vs. gringas! Towards the end of the game, my ankle rolled on top of the ball as I was trying to get it away from our opponent. I dropped right there and laid on the floor holding my ankle in pain. One of the girls from the other team came to me and started to massage my ankle and when she started to do this, I was hurting even more. After a few minutes of this, the pain was lifted and my ankle was practically back to normal. When I stood back up I was shocked that my pain was gone and my ankle was not swollen, because it should have been both.
For the rest of the night, I kept thinking about that kind service that was given to me, appreciation and gratefulness overflowing in my heart. Through that massage I was able to feel almost instant freedom.
More times than not I have found myself sitting in my pain this month, waiting for God to bring me instant freedom from my burdens. I have found myself praying for God to work on other’s hearts, but I haven’t been asking Him to work on mine. I have been asking him to help me practice more self-control with my words, but every opportunity he gives me to bite my tongue, I fail. I find myself asking the Lord to help me with the fruits of the spirit, but how much easier it is to ask God for them without having to put the work in. How can we expect God to work on our behalf when we aren’t willing first to make the necessary changes through the shifting of our mindsets and hearts?
Abandonment I realize is so much more than all of the alone time I wish I had or the memories I wish I wasn’t missing out on with my family. Abandonment is a lot about dying to our flesh and our old ways of life. Abandonment should look like pushing our pride aside everyday so that more and more humility can shine through us. Abandonment should look like sitting in our pain so that God can reveal to us how rotten we are being sometimes. And while this month in particular I feel a lot of the struggles we all have faced have been spiritual, we have the control to push the enemy out by bringing more of God in. We cannot blame the enemy for the attacking us, we knew this would happen; it was expected. We can only blame ourselves for allowing him to come in and create a mess in our hearts and minds.
2 Corinthians 10:5
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
Abandonment is taking EVERY thought captive because how much easier is it to just say what we want when we want? Eventually, what we are thinking and feeling ends up coming out at some point.
Luke 8:17
For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and nothing concealed that will not be known and illuminated.
A lot of me has felt “stuck” this month, but with new eyes to see, God is bringing me out of this place and into a place of freedom again. I am glad that with 7 months still ahead of me, I can say I have learned about said “abandonment” — a term we have heard a a lot since signing up for the world race. I have confronted it face on this month, I have felt it in such real and deep ways, but now I know why this term is so important. It has taught me so much about embracing the good and bad days of this journey and all of the in-between feelings. It has taught me how to sit in timeout with the Father and allow Him to speak into areas of my life that need growth.
Thank you for your continued prayers and support! I feel the prayers that go out for me, I even feel them on the days I struggle and I cannot tell you all how MUCH those prayers mean to me and how much they help bring peace to my heart and mind. I feel so blessed for everyone who reads these blogs and for those of you who are journeying with me this year!
