Its only day 3 here in Colombia. Despite it taking over 36 hours to get here, it was totally worth it. If I’m being truthful, I wasn’t looking forward to Colombia, or South America in general. I didn’t have a desire to come here and I just considered it as part of my route that I hoped would go by quickly. I. Was. Wrong. These people have quickly captured my heart and this country is beautiful. It sucks that you don’t hear about the beauty of Colombia, all you ever hear about is the drugs and violence. Yes, all of that is here, but the Lord is also doing something beautiful.
Our ministry this month is working with a foundation that works with the homeless community (Colombia has the largest number of displaced people in the world. Even more than Syria and other places you hear about all the time.), they also have a program to help people recover from addictions. My favorite time so far has been working with the Men’s ministry. We had a Bible study, that I went into expecting it to be awkward and that no one would talk, but it was the complete opposite. We read Proverbs 10 then began to discuss what stood out to us. At first people were hesitant to share until one of our guys shared his testimony of recovering from drug addictions and being in prison and it completely opened the room. Once that happened everyone wanted to talk, to the point that our translator had to cut people off because it was time for us to finish up. We went to play soccer next, and it was a blast. MY new nickname from the guys is “defencia” because I played defense pretty well.
Speaking of translators, the language barrier is real, and has been a frustration but its crazy how Holy Spirit works and still manages to let you communicate pretty effectively. I’m hoping by month 3 my Spanish will be back to being pretty good. That pretty much wraps up a quick summary of what’s going on. There’s so much more to tell, and I’ll post those in some other blogs over the next few days.
Quick fundraising update, I’m almost to my next goal of 13,000! I need around $700 to reach it and around $5700 to be fully funded, so I would love your support!
