On a Mission

Ever since I first approached the Global Missions team at church about using the missions internship for this trip to Honduras, I’ve had this feeling of being kind of a poser. I’ve felt that way because people keep asking me if I’m taking this trip because I’m thinking about being a missionary in the future, or even assuming that that’s the case. I’ve really felt guilty about saying that those are not my plans. Now I’ve learned that God’s plans aren’t always on the same page as my own plans and that His generally trump mine, but I still answer that question by saying that I don’t have plans to be a “missionary” long term in the future.

However, after I was yet again asked the same question the other day, I got to thinking about my answer and what being a “missionary” really means. And I think I’ve changed my mind. I think we’re all missionaries, but not in the connotation under which I had originally put the word. When I’ve thought of a missionary, the image that has always come to my head has been one of a really brave, independent, young-ish person who ventures off into some unknown country, the “mission field,” where he or she doesn’t know or understand the language or culture and proceeds to assimilate him- or herself with the people there, develop relationships with them, and share Christ’s love through word and action. I wouldn’t say that describes me or my preferred scene very well, and if that’s the definition of a missionary I would definitely not put myself in that category, especially not long term. But once I got to thinking about it, I realized that that is a ridiculously narrow description of a missionary.

The reality is that, whether we like it or not, every Christian is called to be a missionary. The only difference is the “field” in which we serve. You may not be called to drop everything and move to Antarctica where you have to build a hut out of ice cubes and eat whale blubber and convert all the Eskimos, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be called to serve in some other way. You might find that God opens doors for you to minister to the homeless in your own city. Maybe your mission field will be at PTO meetings at your child’s school or in the conference room in your office. Or maybe you are the best person to be an example of Christian living to the people right in your own home. No place is too small or too close to home to be a mission field. I am totally convinced that God can use anyone, at any age, in any place. I have friends my age and younger whose desire to serve God and whose ingenuity in finding ways to do so inspires me, and on the other end of the spectrum, I love and admire that my Grandma at 80 years old still has a huge heart for all sorts of missions and always has a contagious excitement when I tell her about the mission work I’m involved in. God doesn’t have rules or boundaries that limit Him to using a certain kind of person to accomplish His purposes. I guess that what I’m really trying to say is that God won’t fit in the box I had put Him in, and I’m unusually pleased to find out that I’ve been wrong.

You never know where you’ll end up, and I doubt God will ever stop reminding me of that. My prayer is that He will always be able to use me to help build His kingdom and that I won’t ever neglect to show His love in whatever mission field I’m called into. That might mean that I never leave the country again. Or maybe I’ll end up in Antarctica. I wouldn’t mind having a pet penguin.

"Love" is English for "Amor"

This week I have really started to feel like I’m getting more of a grasp of Spanish than I’ve had so far. It’s so good! I mean I’m still definitely not fluent or anything like that, but I’m finding that I generally and consistently understand more of what people are saying. It has made me more confident in having conversations, which means I’m getting even more practice, and it’s just one big happy circle!

I’ve also come to appreciate knowing Spanish more this week with Dad and Shark here. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that not everybody speaks the same language you do until you are forced into a situation where practically nobody speaks the same language you do. I understand and speak enough Spanish that that’s not really an issue for me, and I don’t really think about it until I see other people struggling to communicate. Last night at dinner our waiter offered to take a picture for us and John tried to inform him of how to use the camera by saying “and there’s the zoom!” We all laughed because, of course, the waiter had no idea what John was saying, but when you don’t speak the language you don’t have a choice but to communicate the only way you know how. I have to imagine what it would be like for me if I went to Japan or somewhere like that. I wouldn’t even have any idea of where to start…I would be completely lost! That would be such a frustrating feeling. I’ve heard enough frustration voiced over the language barrier that I will forever be an advocate of learning a second or third language, and this is my plug for doing just that!

It has also been great to have Dad and Shark here this week just so that they can see what I’ve been up to and what God has been up to these past six weeks. Yesterday we went to the house Amber is looking to buy for the Breaking Chains ministry to work on cleaning it up a little bit. The whole house itself is a beautiful piece of architecture and we took a lot of pictures, but they’re all on other cameras (and I wouldn’t be technologically savvy enough to put them up here even if I did have them lol). So suffice it to say that there’s a big courtyard in the middle of the two-story house and it has several little plots that are all overgrown with these unidentified plants, some of which are really spiky and almost all of which are dead and need to be removed. So our job for the day was to clear out those plots and do some general cleaning up. On our way in we ran into a few women who we usually see on our feeding nights, and they came into the house with us and were eager to help us clean. We got most of the courtyard cleared out and a lot of sweeping done in just about an hour, which would never have been possible without their help. It was so cool to see them having a hand in getting the building ready that will potentially be purchased and put to use for their benefit! As we were leaving, several other people we feed came by the house to check it out and everyone wanted to know when they could come back and help clean again. The whole thing was an awesome sight to see! I hope John and Dad can appreciate the gravity of what they saw there, and if you know them you should definitely ask them about it. It is so exciting to think about what opening the doors of that house could do for Amber’s ministry and for the lives of the people who helped us yesterday. Please be praying that God opens His doors to allow that to happen!

Acculturated

That’s such a funny word. It makes me think of cheese. I know it’s weird, but isn’t cheese cultured? Speaking of cheese, Honduran cheese tastes a little funky. It’s kind of more sour tasting, but not in a bad way…it’s just different.

You’ll have to excuse my digression because, believe it or not, I didn’t choose this title because I wanted to talk about cheese. I picked it because that’s how I’m starting to feel. Acculturated. I had to look up the word because I wasn’t sure it was the exact one I wanted to use but when I read the definition (to have absorbed and assimilated the culture of another group of people or another person; to have changed somebody’s cultural behavior and thinking through contact with another culture) I decided it was definitely the right word for how I feel. Over the past couple of days I’ve been finding myself forgetting, I guess you could say, that I’m here in Honduras. It’s hard to describe. There’s this park right down the street from Amber’s house and a lot of mornings I’ll go sit and read on this bench there that has the most amazing view of the city. This morning I was sitting there and every time I looked up from my book I would look around and think “oh yeah, I’m in Honduras…I’d forgotten.” And now it’s becoming really easy to tell people apart, where as when I first got here everyone just looked “Honduran” and faces would kind of run together. It’s not weird that I’m not surrounded by a bunch of white people…in fact I think it will be kind of weird going back to the States, and even more at Lipscomb where that’s pretty much all there is lol. I don’t feel so weird about getting stared at by guys (which, by the way, is not a testament to how attractive you are, it’s purely related to the fact that you’re a girl and, as an added bonus, you’re white). I guess I don’t really notice it anymore. Just little things like that that I’ve been noticing and have made me think I’m just becoming “acculturated.” And in a good way, not like funky cheese.

Joy!

This week has been so full of blessings, I don’t even know where to begin or if I’ll be able to remember them all! I’ll just pick and choose the biggest ones.

Did you know that life doesn’t stop just because you decide to step out of the picture? It’s true. Believe it or not, your friends keep living their normal lives no matter what you’re doing with your own. I guess that realization kind of hit me at the beginning of this week and I started feeling really homesick. The first couple days this week were a little rough, and Wednesday was probably the worst. But then on Wednesday night I got to talk to my mom and Matthew, and then I got on Facebook and a bunch of my friends messaged me and by the end of the night I felt like I had talked to just the right people and had all the right conversations and was feeling much better. It just reminded me that God is definitely faithful!

Last night we had feeding, as usual for a Thursday night, but Darwin had a never-ending dentist appointment and we didn’t get out of the house to start feeding until about an hour after we usually leave. We weren’t sure how many people would actually be out since we were showing up so late, but we ended up seeing pretty much the same people as usual. Our third stop is at a little park and when we got there, there was a mariachi band playing on the corner. One of the guys who is usually at that stop, Junior, often sings mariachi songs for us and uses our water jug as a drum to accompany him, and he was over singing along with the band. After we had finished feeding, a few of the homeless guys walked over with Darwin, Alli, Tess, Amber, and me to where the mariachi band was and proceeded to ask us to dance with them. It was honestly so much fun to see them in that element, having a great time and dancing and laughing. It makes me wish that that were more what their lives were like, full of that joy we saw them with last night.

Today the four first graders we tutor in the Shine program (Escarleth, José, Dayana, and Claudy) didn’t have any homework, so we walked down to the river next to the church at Mateo. We ran around and played in the water and tried not to get too soaked : ) The kids found a bunch of tadpoles and Alli and Tess decided that it would be a brilliant idea to collect them in a two liter bottle and take them home to wait for them to morph into frogs, so we all had a blast trying to catch all these tadpoles and create a little habitat for them in this bottle (which is currently sitting here in our room and will no doubt start to smell like death pretty soon). I love working with them because you kind of get to get out of your own head and just act like a little kid for a while…they’re so carefree and I love that about them!

I really wanted to share all of the positives that I’ve encountered this week, and going back to think about all of them to write them here has made me realize again just how blessed I’ve been to be able to work here in Honduras. I came to help make a difference in the lives of people here, but I feel like I’ve been affected by them more than the other way around. I don’t say that to mean that I don’t feel like I’m accomplishing anything here, I just mean that what I’m experiencing here is so awesome, and I’m really glad I can share that with you all! I hope you can sense just a little bit of my joy!

Contradictions

I meant to blog on Wednesday but time got away from me and all of a sudden it’s Sunday! Not only that, it’s also Valentine’s Day! Here they call it El Día de Amistad, which means Day of Friendship. It’s kind of a big deal, like seriously everybody celebrates it, but it’s more common to do special stuff w your friends instead of w your significant other. Let’s just say that Hallmark would not make a killing in Honduras like they do in the States. I personally like it better this way : )

We’ve been hanging out a lot with the two couples from VCOM who are here working in the clinic, and this weekend we all went to the island of Amapala for a little R&R. It was such a great weekend, we swam in the ocean and got stung by baby jellyfish and got really interesting sunburns and a ton of mosquito bites and played with a bunch of really fun Honduran kids who live on the beach and ate incredible food for dirt cheap prices. It felt like a legit exotic island…well I guess it kind of was! I didn’t have my computer with me, so I was able to block out all school and other obligations and it was so relaxing. I couldn’t have asked for anything better!

This vacation came after a week full of some interesting events. Like I mentioned in my last post, we went to feed lunch at the dump on Wednesday. You could smell the place before you even got to it, and it was awful, like sour milk and nasty trash (pretty typical for a dump, I would think). We drove up the hill to where we were going to be feeding, past mountains and mountains of trash and debris. It seemed like the mountain itself was made out of trash. When we got to the top, it was an intense sight. We were basically on a massive plateau of garbage and there were four groups present: dogs, buzzards, cows, and people. The guy who we were there to help feed, Mike, told us that when the garbage trucks come to dump trash, all of the people and animals flock to the trucks. There is no apparent difference between the animals and people. Randomly around us there were scattered piles of random garbage that turned out to be people’s homes. What a degrading way to live, living among piles of trash and demoted to the level of animals. The feeding itself was pretty similar to what we do at the stadium, but the location on Wednesday made it more difficult for me to stomach.

The title of this post is Contradictions, and that comes into play for me in two aspects. First of all, as you’re standing on top of this mountain of garbage, you look around and realize that you also have an incredible view of God’s creation, the surrounding mountains and valleys that make up the Honduran landscape. People in the States would pay millions of dollars for a view like it, but these people get it for free and if I were in their shoes I would pay millions of dollars to be anywhere but there. It just seems so backwards. But second and more importantly, is there any worse contradiction than for smelly piles of garbage or dirty street corners to be the homes of the people God created to be His children? Humans weren’t created to live in heaps of trash, we were created for the Garden of Eden. Granted, none of us lives in the Garden of Eden, or anything remotely close to it for that matter, but a home made out of cardboard and used tires isn’t exactly the next best thing.

I know this is getting long but it’s what’s on my heart tonight. I don’t want people back home to feel like this is an issue that is far removed from the States, that it only affects people in third world countries like Honduras. Go downtown, go to the soup kitchens and to the street corners. The poverty of God’s precious children is all around us. How long will we stand by and let the contradiction remain the way it is, when God is calling to us to bring justice to the people He has created?

Isaiah 58:6-7

Three weeks already?!

Well, last week was completely LOCO and I’m stinking exhausted, but I had an absolute blast! In fact, I think I had more fun last week than anyone else lol. It’s amazing how much fun you can have when you don’t acknowledge the stressors and look for the best in the people around you rather than the worst. The VCOM students were so much fun to work with, and it was a totally different experience than I’d had here before. We’ve done medical missions when our church has come down here, and I’ve translated in the clinic, but I feel like I got so much more out of it this time. I was really focused on trying to connect with the people I was working with, both the patients and the students. It’s amazing how much you can learn about someone after spending just a few minutes with them, and even more after a few days. Just putting your hand on someone’s shoulder and genuinely asking them how they’re doing always seems to put a smile on their face. I know it sounds cliché, but smiles make people happy and there aren’t many things that can make you happier than knowing you put that smile on a person’s face.

This week is back to business as usual. Even as good as last week was, I’m glad to be back to the old schedule where I actually feel like I have time to breathe. We’re back to feeding, which I love, and tutoring the Shine kids. Yesterday we had a Superbowl party (let’s just say I was making a rather extravagant scene during most of the fourth quarter), but the point is that at the party there was a missionary couple who feed lunch to the homeless people at the dump on Wednesdays and I think we’re going to go with them to do that this week, and I’m definitely looking forward to that. I’m anticipating that it will be a much different experience than I’ve had here yet, so I’ll update after that happens.

One interesting thing I’m noticing is that as my Spanish improves, my English seems to be getting worse. I mentioned it to Amber and she said that the same thing happened to her when she first got here. She said it’s because you have to fit your English vocabulary into such a smaller number of Spanish words and consequently that gets mirrored back to your English too. And that sounds exactly right to me. I’ve never been especially great at verbal communication anyway, so now I just find myself tripping over words in English even more than usual lol. At least it makes for good entertainment for Amber and Alli and Tess! And hopefully it’s proof that my Spanish is getting better!

Before I left, I asked a lot of you at home to be praying that I would have confidence in what I’m doing here. I want to follow through on that by saying that I think those prayers have been answered thus far. I still don’t know exactly what my purpose here is, but I have no doubt that even if I never have some huge revelation about what exactly it is, I have been able to touch people and build for God’s kingdom here. And I know that after only being here for three weeks! I can’t imagine what the next ten will bring! Thank you all for all of the prayers you’ve been lifting up for me, they’re very much appreciated! I love you!

Learning

Yesterday was our first day helping the VCOM med students at the clinic, and it was definitely an exciting experience. They are first year students who know just about as much about medicine as I do. The only thing different is that they know all the technical terms for body parts and stuff. But for example, I was translating in the room where the students were taking vitals (triage I guess, for you medical people who know what that is), and one of the students came in and didn’t know how to use a thermometer. It was one of the ones that looks like a stick that you stick in a box. I don’t know, but every doctor I’ve been to has used one like it so I’ve definitely seen them before and know how they work. And none of the students who worked in my room today knew how to use a personal blood glucose monitor. I’ve seen them on TV commercials and they’re not super difficult to use. So I was teaching a med student how to take temperatures and blood glucose readings. I felt like I was a med student myself, soaking up all the medical terms and procedural details from the nurse who works at the clinic and other people who knew what they were doing. I definitely left knowing a lot more than I did when I got there, and about things I never expected to or intended to learn. It’s cool what you can see when you open your eyes!

I found myself in an interesting position today. I’m usually the one visiting Honduras on a short-term mission, but today it was like I was the reigning expert on all things Honduras-related. The med students just assumed that because I had been to Honduras before and am working here as a longer-term intern, I automatically knew what was going on. They were all very wide-eyed and out of their comfort zone when they arrived, and between yesterday and today it has been amazing to see how much my having confidence around them gives them more confidence. Don’t get me wrong, I never pretend to know what’s going on if I don’t, but I do try to seem confident in what I’m doing. I’m able to see things from both perspectives now. I’ve been on short-term missions where on the first day you just want to be around someone who knows what they’re doing and how to handle the culture. For me, that person in Honduras has always been Amber. Having been here for a couple weeks now, I realize that the sun doesn’t rise and fall on Amber and that she is just a normal person, but every other time I’ve been here she has seemed superhuman somehow, as if she was the key to unlocking the secrets of Honduran culture because she has been here for a long time and generally seems to know what’s going on. Now I see that my perception of her was very much born from the confidence she exudes, and I see that having that same confidence about myself and what I’m doing can provide that same comfort to others.

It didn’t take me very long to realize that it’s really not difficult to encourage people and make feel good about themselves and that I really like doing it. I mean, I’ve always known that about myself, but I guess it was just more profound in this setting. So many little things show people that you care and can make them feel more comfortable. Making a real effort to know people’s names and calling them by them often is surprisingly effective. Noticing something special about specific people and complimenting them on those attributes really lights them up too. Not flattery, I’m talking about qualities you genuinely think are great about that person. And smiles can never be overestimated!!! These first year med students were just thrown into these crazy situations, trying to communicate in a foreign country using a foreign language, and they needed as many confidence boosters as they could get. And by providing that for those med students today, I felt like I helped them even more than I helped the patients themselves, which was not what I had expected, but not at all an unfulfilling way to spend my day!

And thanks for all of the prayers, I can guarantee that they are having the desired effects. Keep it up! God is amazing, and let's not forget to tell Him so!