We had a pretty rough night one Sunday in the Philippines.
We are now safely in South Africa and getting to know our new hosts and ministry, but that’s not what this blog is about.
We’d been staying at a place we call the Lighthouse. The organization is called Kid’s International Ministries, or KIM for short. The 24 girls that were in Tacloban from our squad stay downstairs with the staff who work and live at the Lighthouse.
The Lighthouse houses several short term missions trips throughout the year from all over the world. One Sunday, there was a team of 6 from Washington State with us, and then a big group from China who had also joined us there. It was pretty hectic.
I was woken up one Sunday night (Monday morning if you want to get technical) to my team leader saying “hey, I need you to get up and move everything off of the ground.” Needless to say, I was pretty confused. My team and I took all of our belongings and stacked them up, making sure nothing electronic or important was left on the bottom. We then stepped outside our makeshift bedroom to find our home flooded.
Water was quickly making its way into our room. We stumbled into the kitchen and started grabbing bowls and pans and buckets to pour the water down the drain. The water level was above our ankles. Apparently, there was a typhoon and it had been storming and raining pretty hard for a few hours, but somehow I slept through all the thunder.
We were cleaning up water for a few hours until we finally got it all out. We then proceeded upstairs to make some coffee and settle down a bit from the rude awaking we had just had.
The water was positively nasty. At one point, there was a dead rat floating around, there were also several piles of dog poop, and who knows what else was in that water. The flooding also contaminated our clean water supply so we had to buy big barrels of water for days before we could get it cleaned out again.
As we were all sitting around early on Monday morning trying to process what just happened and trying to stay awake on such little sleep, the team of 6 starting pouring into us. They spoke life over us, prayed over us, and encouraged us. They were an absolute blessing.
One of their members got up and shared with us that when she arrived at the Lighthouse, God told her to wash our feet. She said that she ignored God because she was tired and wanted to go on to bed. When this flood happened, God again told her to wash our feet, and this time, she was going to obey.
None of us had so much as rinsed off our feet since being in the disgusting flood water. Their entire team got on their hands and knees and washed each and every one of our feet. As they were doing so they prayed for us and spoke individual words of encouragement over us. It was a humbling moment. We came to the Lighthouse to serve, and here we were being served.
Sometimes God shakes things up and rattles you awake. When you least expect it, He shows you such a basic, yet beautiful picture of what life on mission is all about.
