It is just a regular Thursday here in the Dominican Republic. We spent our afternoon, like many others, prayer walking and going door to door to spread the gospel and meet the people in the community. Today, I was on the prayer team and we began by walking up and down the streets covering the area in prayer.
We begin walking and immediately I begin noticing all the garbage littering the streets. Everything from diapers, to food wrappers, drug paraphanilia, and beer bottles, etc. My heart sank as I saw toddlers roaming around with all this stuff surrounding them.
As we get to the end of the street, my teammates and I see a river down the hill and immediately feel called to go down to the water. We begin walking and the closer we get the more trash there is… discarded televisions, mounds of diapers, old tires, more bottles, needles.
We finally get down to the water and it’s beautiful. Amidst all the chaos surrounding us, we’d found this place of peace and beauty.
After taking it all in, we begin walking back to where we started.
We sat on the street corner waiting for the rest of our group and host to go back home. At this point, it’s been a long day. I look across the street and see a little girl sitting on the porch step of the small house looking at me. I wave and the game begins. After a few minutes of back and forth, I grab some crackers out of my bag and my teammate to translate and head over. ??As I approach the tiny home, a man comes out. My friend translates and greets him. He refuses to shake our hands and asks what we are doing here. I tell him that I brought crackers for the sweet little girl and hand them over. He takes them and thanks us. We then begin asking questions about his life and attempt to share the gospel. He begins to laugh at us and shut down. We still offer to pray for him and his home. That’s when women start shuffling out of his home… 12 women between the ages of 12-45 come sit down in the living room, and my heart drops. ??It’s clear that he is their pimp and this is a business, not a home. ??He tells us we can pray for the girls but not him. We pray and tell the women about a church service around the corner and hope they will attend.
We cross the street again to wait for our group. Everyone is done for the day but still my soul is stirring. I look to my right and sitting ten feet away was a woman in a chair. I could tell she was waiting for someone. As I watched, I began praying for her. Just a few minutes pass, and a middle aged mother on a motorcycle pulls up holding a toddler. I see the woman from the chair reach into her bra, pull out a bag full of powder and hand it off. The bike drives away, baby and drugs in tow.
My heart breaks again.
My host walks up and I tell him what happened and that I need to go talk to this woman. We head over together. After a few minutes of small talk, I ask her if she’s heard of a man named Jesus. She said she had but didn’t really know anything about Him.
I was immediately reminded of the river from our walk earlier. God showed me just a few hours before that in order to marvel at the beautiful things you have to acknowledge the broken and the messy surrounding it first.
We spoke for about fifteen minutes and at the end, she asked me for a hug and thanked me. She said she didn’t know if she was ready to turn her life over yet, but may stop by our service and Bible study later in the week.
We all have trash in our past we aren’t proud of. We all have things we’d like to hide, to run away from, or to bury below the surface. Since being on the Race, it has become extremely clear to me that I am more often than not messy. I can’t not wait to see what marvelous river awaits me at the end of this 11 month adventure.
