Concluding thoughts from Guatemala

I am currently in a South Korea airport, bound for Ho Chi Min, Vietnam. I realize I haven’t written a blog in quite some time and am here to update you guys on whats transpired these busy last couple of weeks as best I can.

For starters, the beautiful perfect life I described in my last post finally hit some speed bumps and forced me to grow a lot. I met this woman who had lost basically everything to head trauma including the ability to speak and basic motor functions. As soon as we saw her she just started to break out into tears exclaiming “lo que tu” over and over because they were the only words she could use to communicate now. She understood everyone but had lost the ability to express her thoughts in a way that people could understand her. She had lost her pledged husband and every relative had abandoned her so that she now lived in the back shack of a kind lady she did not knows house. I had never seen suffering and brokenness face to face like that. Honestly, it would have been easier for me to have stumbled across a dead person, because she was virtually dead already, trapped in her own body. The few days after we met I was pretty messed up in the head. I had to take time to grieve, because I had known that creation was fallen but now I had really seen it looking at me face to face, crying out for help. This is why we are here, to rescue the world from the chains of sin and death. How often I take for granted the luxury of being able to speak, to move my body, to have even one person on the earth who won’t abandon me. How can I go on living a life that is not entirely connected to the healing and vindication of people like her who are hopelessly shackled in the dark with no knowledge of the good news. This is why we were called, dedicating my life to anything else isn’t just unbiblical, it’s a disrespect to the woman in Palima whose name I was never told. I wept and wept with her and after we had left I later wept in front of my whole team as I recounted what had happened. When you see agony like that it has an almost sacred feeling to it. I hold a reverence for that day and for her. Even though this was the type of perspective shifting experience I wanted to have when I signed up to go on mission, its still no easy pill to swallow. I couldn’t laugh for a whole day after our encounter because it didn’t feel a right and ordinate behavior to engage in. Joy and mirth didn’t feel appropriate while her image still lingered in my mind. After a day or two the lord took me from a posture of “why would you allow this to happen” to feeling as if I was mourning not at, but alongside God for the sheep who have been far and long lost to the enemies world. I got to feel a new, much more intense side of the Lord and Im glad I got the privilege to experience it.

On a less morbid note, I also got really sick and pooped myself the morning before we were supposed to hike up this active volcano so I ended up missing out on what could be labeled a “once in a lifetime experience”, however I am determined to return one day and see it with me own eyes. I think something God is trying to purge from my system is this underlying drive for new adventurous experiences that sometimes supersedes my allegiance to his will and to the kingdom. Screwtape calls it the “fear of the same old thing” and writes that our pursuit of novelty is highly subject to the law of diminishing returns. The more I meditate on it the more I see that its true. Whats another view? Another country? The closer we get to these sparkly things and experiences the more we see they wind up giving us little to no high. If we travel around on adventures looking for something outside of ourselves, we are no better than the person who toils for fast cars and expensive homes. You’ll never be satisfied having clutched either, in a way that you were incapable of if you possessed neither. I have to learn to put that to death so I can further surrender my life. Missing the hike worked as a sort of fast from adventure and novelty.

Wasn’t all bad though. In the last few weeks of ministry we got to help throw 2 massive christmas parties in the fields of the two poor villages we do work in. 100s of people came out to socialize and recieve their free pollo campero which is this massively popular fried chicken chain in Guatemala who donated 1000s of pieces of chicken to One Way for these christmas parties. It was really cool to see how the lord provided food for all of these families, many of which struggle to get food on the table on a daily basis.

Otherwise nothing super out of the ordinary went down. Just the usual house visits and soccer training. One morning we stumbled upon this drunk man in the street, he wanted us to pray for him because he couldnt seem to stop drinking. We prayed over him and exchanged some thoughts and scripture before he walked away. 3 days later we ran into him chopping wood in the backyard of where we put our stuff for ministry. I didnt even recognize him but Nick was confident that this was the guy so we walked over to talk to him and sure enough it was the same guy sober as a doorknob. Alcoholism is a huge problem in Guatemala and many fathers are trapped in its grip. When we had met him he was 3 days drunk and since we prayed for him he had been about 3 days sober so thats pretty cool. Those are my favorite moments of ministry but I still love the other parts like playing soccer with the chicos. One day, saying goodbye to a pretty long era of long flowy hair, I got my head buzzed by one of the soccer kids who wants to be a barber someday and I must say he did a pretty solid job. Also at some point all of them started calling me “tio” which means uncle in Spanish, so thats funny. We spent our last few days building a house which was nice because I really like working with my hands, not about saying the right thing or giving valuable insight, its just deep love expressed with simple service. We also had a whole squad and staff public worship service in the middle of an Antigua park which was pretty swell, and I learned a new card game from Clayton called “Rook” which I can now say I have hours of experience in with no regrets except that it has eaten into my sleep a few nights which is never ideal, however if given the opportunity to go back and amend my mistakes, I would probably just cave again and stay up with my friends to play a stupid card game.

Cant wait to get started in Vietnam. Once we debrief in Ho chi Min we have a 20 hour bus ride down south to De Nang, where we will be based for the next few weeks. Ministry will be a lot less structured and very relational. Most of these people have never heard the gospel and our squad is super excited to be the first bringers of the good news to the people we meet

 

 

 

Heres some film I just got back from our time in Guate. Enjoy