Last Saturday we had a full day of ministry. The students and I met in the morning to pray and give ourselves fully to the Lord, asking Him to use us, to lead us and guide us in all we would do that day.
We started by going to Neftali's (or Lee) house. Lee is the young man pictured here with his mom, sister and brother. Lee was on the team that went to La Vega a few weeks ago. I feel like I have gotten to know Lee fairly well over the past few weeks. I really respesct his ministry and his passison for the Lord.
During our trip to La Vega, Lee talked about his family, how much he loves them and how he so desperately wants them to invite Jesus into their lives and come to church. Whenever we pray together as a team, Lee's request is always the same - that his family would come to know Jesus.
Saturday morning we (Lee, Yahson, Clara, Duanny and I) went to visit Lee's mom, sister and little brother. We talked with them for quite awhile about God, faith and Jesus. It was powerful. I felt God's spirit there with us. We spoke the truth from God's word, loved them and listened to them as they shared from their hearts. At one point, Lee's sister started crying. She said she wanted to go to church and be a Christian, but she wanted to wait for her mom.
Lee's mom said she believes in God. She has several stories about how God has been faithful to her and her family during sickness and other difficult circumstances. She seems to know the truth, yet something is holding her back.
We ended the time there that afternoon by standing together in a circle, holding hands and each one taking a turn praying. Lee's little brother even stood with us and shared his requests with the Lord. I continue to lift up Lee and his family, and I invite you to pray for them as well. May God move the mountain - whatever it is - and bring his children home!
After the visit, we stopped in the street for a few minutes to reflect on the time we spent with Lee's family. We thanked God for being with us and for the work He is doing in their hearts. We commented that we should have that same deep desire and passion for all of God's children to come into relationship with him. And, we asked God to continue to guide us that day.
As we were talking and praying an older woman approached us, asking if we would pray for her. She was feeling very alone and had a specific request for a granddaughter or niece to come and stay with her again. As we prayed, she was crying. We gave her words of encouragement from the Bible and assured her that we would continue to pray for her. Her name is Cruzmaria if you'd like to pray for her.
From there we continued to the local grocery store, Iberia. (It's like a smaller version of Walmart.) I wanted to buy a few things for my refrigerator in my apartment. Then we walked home. We had a few hours to rest before the next activity.
Evangelismo con Los Juveniles
At 4pm, the juveniles (jr. high students) were meeting. They wanted to do evangelism, and we were going to support them and act as guides for them as they did this ministry. We had talked earlier in the week about how we would explain evangelism to someone who had never done it before. We agreed on 2 things.
1. We need to let God and the Holy Spirit be our guide. We need to pray before we start and throughout the time we are together. We need to be looking and listening for promptings from the Holy Spirit as we talk and visit with others. If God puts something in our minds or hearts to say, we need to be willing to say it.
2. We need to be good listeners. We need to ask questions and listen really well. We need to really try to understand the person, what he/she is saying and where they are coming from. We DO NOT have to have all the answers! We said our job is NOT to try to convince or talk someone into a relationship with God. Our job is to listen, to love and to speak the truth. God will do the rest!
We talked about how when we do evangelism we have to be ready for anything. When we knock on a door, we never know what we will find. We might find someone who has been a following the Lord for years and who could teach us a few things. We might find someone who is having a hard day and just needs some encouragement. We could find someone who is sick and wanting prayer. We could find someone who is so far from God and hasn't thought about God in years. We could find someone who is hungry for God and Truth.
This is another reason why it's so important for us to be good listeners. Our job is to listen carefully, make ourselves available to be used be God and do what we can to love, support and encourage each of these people in their faith journey.
So, the six leaders and I had talked about this a few days earlier. I called the leaders together and instructed them to teach these jr. high students what we had discussed about evangelism. Then we had the students find a partner. We assigned one leader to each group and headed out.
The location they chose to do evangelism was a bit of a hike. I have to admit the entire time we were together I felt like I was herding sheep! The sheep had a hard time staying focused and staying together. I wish I would have taken pictures of this, but I was too wrapped up in what we were doing at the time to think of that. Some sheep would walk really fast. Others would walk really slow. Some sheep kept getting distracted and wanted to run off to buy a piece of candy or a bottle of water or forgot their Bible or wanted to change their clothes...it was driving me crazy!! :)
I had to remind the leaders to be leaders a few times, too. The teacher in me was definitely coming out!
After we got to the evangelism site, things went much better. We found a few streets to work and split off into the teams we had created. I reminded the leaders that they were to encourage, support and give feedback when needed but the jr. high students were to do most of the talking.
After we got there we changed our approach a little. We decided it would be appropriate to use this opportunitity to go door to door and simply explain who we are, where we are from and invite as many people as possible to come to church the next day instead of spending a lot of time talking with each family. That was ok. That's probably a better for a first-time experience, anyway! The bus passes through that neighborhood, too, so it wold be easy for people to hop on the bus and join us for church.
It really enjoyed this afternoon. It was so neat to see the enthusiasm of the jr. high students and to see the youth acting as teachers and leaders. I loved it! The sheep were doing a good job!!
We gathered together under a tree when we were done to debrief. I prompted the leaders with a few questions...Did you enjoy doing evangelism? What surprised you? What did you see God do? What would you do differently next time?
We ended our time together by gathering in the house of the Co-Pastor of our church - Rudolpho. Anyone who has served in the DR on one of the Woodridge Teams knows Rudulpho. He always leads us in the construction of the houses. His wife was not feeling well, so we visited for a while and then prayed for her. It was fun to see Rudolpho and his family together in their home.
Escuela Altagracia
On Sunday morning I talked to Jose, Rudolpho's future son-in-law. Jose has worked as a translator for us in the past. He is currently working as a teacher in Altagracia, a Haitian village about an hour away from Hato Mayor. I have talked to Jose before about his school and wanted to ask him again how things were going.
Jose has about 50 students that he works with each day. Half of them go to school in the morning; the other half in the afternoon. Jose said the biggest need in their community right now is water. He talked about the challenges that come because of the lack of water. Jose said students miss class regularly or don't attend at all because they have to go out and look for water - for their families and for the school. Sometimes they have to walk a long ways before they are able to find good water.
Jose and a few mothers try to cook a meal for the students each day. Many days they are unable to cook because they don't have water. On these days, Jose sends them home with bread, eggs, and bananas because they need to eat something! I would love to visit this school and to be able to help Jose bring water to this community.
La Romana
On Monday we made a trip to La Romana. We went to deliver some more boxes of ImpactLives food and a generator.
These are some pictures of the big church in La Romana. This church was started last year in February. Gradually, as God provides the funds, the construction continues. You can see the roof is done and so is the altar. This church still needs doors, windows, floor, bathroom, electricity, etc.
This is a new church in La Romana that Pastor Carlos and his church are supporting. It's called Pica Piedra. This is a very small building - smaller than my dad's garage. Pictured below are the pastor and his wife and the group that made the trip to La Romana that day. Many are the youth that I have been working with.
These are pictures of the inside of the church Pica Piedra. There was a chalk board inside that had a lot of writing on it, I wonder if they are using this building as a classroom as well. They may be teaching spanish as there are many Haitians in this community whose first language is Creole.
There were kids playing baseball in the street. It looked like fun! I also saw a few kids flying "kites" made of a few sticks and a garbage bag.
Tuesday - Wendy's house
The students and I were together every morning last week. We were in a week of fasting and prayer. Our fasting started at 7:30 and lasted until noon. We spent a lot of time on our knees last week, pouring our hearts out to the Lord and receiving the blessings of His presence, reassurance of His sovereignty, His grace and His love. It was a very powerful week for me. I will try to explain in a minute.
After our time of prayer and fasting on Tuesday, we walked to Wendy's house. Wendy is a friend in the church who was sick. We stopped to say hello, encourage and pray for her. Wendy is the daughter of Pablo, the pastoral worker of Kilo 16. Pablo's and Wendy's house is tucked back in the trees, away from the road. To get to his house we walked through this "tunnel" carved out of the trees.
I don't even have a picture of Wendy. Again, I wanted to be respectful. She was still in her pajamas and hadn't brushed her hair. I don't think she would have liked me taking a picture!
This is a picture of her mom, her house and her niece. In the picture on the right you see the big containers they use to hold their water.
Here are some pictures of the inside of the house - the living room and the kitchen in the back. The bedrooms are behind the curtain.
Pablo had many trees that produce Guayaba, a fruit the youth seem to like very much! The youth took several Guayaba with them to eat. One girl took a big bag home with her to make juice, I assume. I couldn't help but wonder if Pablo really wanted us to take all of this fruit. I wondered if he would rather have sold it and made a profit instead.
This is the road we walked along and a small store near Pablo's house.
And, these are some pictures of the Water Project that I've mentioned before. This facility is open Monday through Saturday, and people from all over the community come to get water for their homes. They carry the water back and forth in these blue jugs. Most people come on their mopeds or motorcycles, often carrying 2 or 3 jugs of water with them!
Kristin's insights...
As I mentioned, this was a big week for me. At times it was extremely challenging, but I feel good about it now. God is showing me and teaching me so much and shaping me at the same time. Sometimes it's a little painful, but in the end it's always good.
Let's see if I can unpack this for you. I'm not going to be able to explain it all, and it might be hard to understand. I'll do my best!
This week God has been teaching me more about culture and about doing ministry within a culture that is very different from my own. I'm realizing how deep our cultural differences really go.
We do speak different languages, eat different foods and live in different conditions, but there's so much more to it than that! The environment in which we are raised and the conditions in which we live shape so much of who we are, how we think, how we relate with other people, what's important to us - even our views of God.
Many of these people live so differently from the way I do, and no matter how hard I try I will never completely understand what it's like to live on less than $2 a day. I could try to live this way or live among them for a while, but still I have a choice. At any minute if I wanted I could walk away and go back to the comforts in which I am accustomed to living.
For example, I don't know if I will ever understand what it's like to work all day, knowing that I have a family waiting for me to bring home whatever I can find or earn for supper. I could do this for a day, a week, maybe even a month. And, whenever I choose to walk away from this little exercise, I would certainly have a new perspective and a deeper appreciation for the gifts God has given me. It would probably encourage me to be more generous when I go back home. But these people don't have a choice. They can't walk away. Living this way for a lifetime would make me a very different person.
I've been doing these short-term mission trips for years. I've probably been on 8 or 9 such trips, but never lasting more than 2 weeks at a time. It got to the point that the living conditions were not much of a surprise to me anymore. I knew life was hard for these people, but I didn't think about all that is affected because of it. This week God helped me to see that since I've been here even though I knew there were cultural differences, I have been operating as an American. I have been operating as if we were still basically the same, but we are not. We approach things very differently. If I want to lead effectively in this culture, I have a lot to learn!
Now, I'm not trying to say that God can't use me, that He hasn't been using me or that my time here has been a waste. Absolutely not! I know that God is using this for good and teaching all of us all sorts of things - that's how great God is. I do feel like I need to change my approach as I go forward.
I need to do a lot more listening and observing. The book I've been reading, "Serving with Eyes Wide Open - Doing Short-term Missions with Cultural Intelligence" says that as Americans we operate so much out of a human-centered approach. To us, everthing is urgent. We are very quick to jump into action and take charge in any given situation. We often do this without thinking about the long-term implications and about how this will affect many different groups of people. We just want to do something. We want to solve the problem and NOW!
The author, David Livermore, clearly states that we must hold on to some sense of urgency. We can't be missional without it. Jesus IS coming again. There are people who need to hear the Truth, but we can't take it too far. The final sentences of this chapter in the book on urgency are as follows: "Most of all, we must not live as if God's mission is somehow contigent upon our plans and strategies. God remains on the throne and continues his redemptive work with or without our frantic sense of urgency."
This is just one example of me bringing my Americanness into the culture here. I'm sure there are many more - some that I'm aware of and some that I'm not!
Another thing that is interesting to me is that our cultures even affect how we view God and how we interpret the Bible. When I think about God, I focus on the close, intimate, personal relationship I have with God - the ways God is like me. Another culture might focus on the ways God is inifintely different from us - His power, majesty, Holiness, etc.
Now, God is not one or the other. Our God is so amazing that He's both Father/friend and Almighty King/Creator/Provider. It's true that as work together we get a more accurate picture of who God is, but if I am teaching, preaching or leading in another culture it's very important that I acknowledge God as the Holy God He is and that I operate out of that perspective.
Are you understanding? It's getting complicated. I'm looking forward to spending time with Dr. Chappy, students and professors for the Global and Contextual Studies program at Bethel University. I leave on Wednesday for Santo Domingo and will be staying there until November 1st. I am praying that God would teach me a lot more about this culture and about how to operate effectively here.
Gloria a Dios!
