Hi everyone hope you are all doing well, I miss you guys!!
We had another great week of ministry this week! I really feel like we have settled into life on the mountain and gotten the flow of our work down. It is crazy to think that tomorrow we will be 2 weeks away from occluding our time with Dar Para Dar. The time I have gotten to spend with our hosts Chako, Chicho and David has been awesome and I have learned so much from them all. Although I must say that I am very excited to see Noah the other guy on our squad on a regular basis. Up until this time we have been on separate teams and only seen each other once or twice a week. God has been working in us both a lot during this time but we are both very excited to be reunited and get to encourage each other in our walks with God. Starting on March 18th we go into a time of teaching, training and debriefing on our time here in Guatemala. This has been an awesome step in our missionary journey and a great place to get our “toes wet”. Our next stops will be eSwatini and South Africa where we will face a whole slew of new challenges. I am anticipating much more push back resistance and spiritual warfare while we are in these locations so I am looking forward to the challenge and being able to fully rely on on God.
This past week in Guate we had so many different activities going on. On Sunday we travelled to Guatemala City to meet up with the family of one of our team members. They were so loving and welcoming to us, we didn’t even know until we got there that it was a family members birthday party so we got to be apart of that and it was all a really enjoyable time. I got to spend some good quality time with Chako on the drive and learn all sorts of things about life, fatherhood and working in ministry from him. I am excited to continue to develop that friendship over the next few weeks and hopefully for years to come. On Monday we received a great teaching from Chako and then I spent the afternoon with Noah working on the accounting that we have been made responsible for. This was certainly a role assigned by God as I am not the best with my own finances so making me responsible for everyones has certainly been a challenge. One of the biggest things he has shown me through this process is how I handle stressful situations. I used t think that when I was going to be doing something I knew would be stressful the best thing I could do was isolate myself, grit my teeth and plow through it. But since stepping into this role he has shown me his faithfulness even in the small things and how I should be giving these trying times to him and how I can bring him glory by handling them with grace and patience. Tuesday we were back at school teaching English and phys ed classes. It has ben so cool to see the kids excitement for school and the time we get to spend with them. I recently learned that just over 2 years ago there were 15 or so kids in the school, they now have over 150 attending regularly. The 12-14 year old boys also took it upon themselves to recruit more friends for the soccer team. It was cool to see them take ownership of the team and have the desire to grow and improve through hard work. This was a lesson I learned as a kid through sports growing up so it will be cool to watch these young men realize the fruits of putting in the work and that good things are worth working hard for. On Wednesday we were back in Patzun helping to build the house for the family there, it is almost finished and this week we hope to pour the cement for the floor and put the roof on! We will be having another World Race team join us this week who are on “gap year” which is usually 18-20 year olds. It will be refreshing to have their youthful spunk and energy with us as well as the opportunity to share some of our wisdom and insight with them. Thursday we worked in the mountain cutting down trees and taking the branches off to use them to build fencing for Prayer Mountain. It is incredible hard to drag a tree trunk up a mountain let me tell you. That was a first and something I would be all right with being a last as well. Friday we had Sabbath and took the day to rest. A few of our team mates myself included got sick at the end of this week so please be praying for a speedy and full recovery!!
On Monday the teaching we received from Chako was very fruitful. It was all about seeking our secret place with God and removing ourselves from the busyness of life to spend intimate time with God. It was also about how we must be patient and wait for him to reveal himself to us. So often we wait for him but only as long as we feel comfortable or we wait to hear from him and when we do we don’t agree with what he is saying to us and thus we rationalize our own thoughts rather than accepting his. Paul was an expert at waiting to hear from the Lord. Galatians 1 is packed with insight about how we are to seek God and what it is that we will receive when we do take time to sit in his presence. In verses 11-12 we see Paul say that all that he learned about the gospel he received through revelation of Jesus Christ. He doesn’t say that he learned the gospel through YouTube or the “verse of the day” but from revelation he received from Jesus Christ. He further brings this point home in verses 16-17 when he says that he did not immediately consult with anyone nor did he go into the city to receive more information from the apostles that came before him. Instead he went into the wilderness and sought more revelation from the Lord. What this means to me is that God wants to reveal himself to you, he also has a unique and special message that he wants to reveal specifically to you. In Psalms 143:8 it says “Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.” God wants to guide us and reveal his purpose for our life to us but he also wants to help guide us in our everyday decisions as well. We should seek God in our secret place and lift up our souls or our burdens to him. Then we can wait patiently to hear what he has to say about the things that burden us. He is a God of steadfast love he wants to hear our burdens and he wants us to invite him into speaking his wisdom over those situations. Psalms 66:20 says “Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer removed his steadfast love from me!” So take your burdens to him he will not reject your prayers or look down upon you for having troubles he will delight in the fact that you take refuge in him. Then as I said once we have taken our burdens to him we must wait patiently in our secret place with him and trust that he will work our situation for his good and his will for our lives. Psalms 52:9 says “I will thank you forever, because you have done it. I will wait for your name, for it is good.” Here the Psalmist shows that we must be thankful for his completed work even if it hasn’t come to fruition here on earth yet. We must give our troubles to him and trust that as soon as we do he is working behind the scenes to protect and prosper us. Sometimes we have to wait to receive our answer or see the outcome but while we wait we can live in peace and confidence knowing that his plan is always better than our own.
