Do you believe in angels? How about Ecuadorian angels? No? Okay, well then you probably better stop reading.
Seriously. I wouldn’t read any farther if I were you.
Fine. You asked for it. 🙂
So I’m officially the religious zealot of my friends: tweeting scripture, Facebooking peeps about the Gospel, giving Bibles as birthday gifts. “Guess Kay drank the punch!” I imagine some of my friends saying. But you know, I’ll be honest. I might be saying the same thing if the roles were reversed. After all this was a pretty drastic shift. Not long ago I was a party girl, my biggest worry being whether or not Manchester United was going to sell Wayne Rooney.
I was content in that life, safe in my little bubble. Was that life perfect? Not by any means. Was it comfortable? Absolutely, and I had big plans: Eastern Europe, Croatia, my writing….
But then God happened. Trust me when I say I didn’t see HIM coming.
It all started after a mission trip to Oklahoma. I had been thinking a lot about THE LORD’S PRAYER, specifically the part that says: Thy will be done.
Thy will. As in the Lord’s Will.
Problem was, I didn’t know what God’s Will might be. What did He expect of me? What did He want me to do with my life? I liked to think I was already in line with whatever He had planned, but then why wasn’t anything going right? Why did I feel so unfulfilled? No matter what I tried, everyone and everything always left me feeling empty. I was hungry for…something. What, I didn’t know, but I desperately wanted to fill that void inside me.
A lot of people said prayers for me during the OKC mission trip. I was there for the tornado relief efforts, and when Adventures in Missions told me to have five people pray for me each day I was gone, I went a bit extreme and asked one person from every country where I have friends.
From Canada to Northern Ireland, England to Dubai, I had friends praying for me from just about every continent and in just about every accent and language you can imagine. There was even a man in the Holy Land who was praying for me. He’s a Catholic priest located right in the heart of Jerusalem—the very place where Jesus Christ was crucified two thousand years ago.
My fellow missionaries in OKC prayed for me too: that I would come to learn God’s Will and that I would learn to distinguish His Voice from the orchestra of thoughts playing in my mind. I hoped it would work.
Hoped. I didn’t actually think it would.
Fast-forward to August: One Saturday an acquaintance asked me to meet him at a restaurant called Panera Bread. I had some audio recordings on my laptop that he wanted, and although I hadn’t been too fussed to accommodate him, something compelled me to go ahead and meet him that day. It was quite an arduous task: first I couldn’t find the place, circling the block several times; then I couldn’t find him in the restaurant. Finally, we connected.
It was kind of a strange meeting under even stranger circumstances. I really didn’t know the guy that well, and the files he wanted had to do with his car being towed—it’s a long story, but let me just say that because the audio recordings involved him, handing them over seemed like the right thing to do. But I kept questioning myself, wondering if I really wanted to get tangled up in his drama. Several times I wondered if I’d made a mistake by meeting him.
The guy and I were sitting at a table, chatting about his conundrum, when suddenly a man burst through the entrance to the restaurant! He was speaking Spanish, rapidly, and he seemed to be asking if anyone else spoke Spanish too. He was a mighty man–at least 6’5” with a solid build to match–and I normally would have been far too intimidated to approach him; but he was in such disarray that when he marched to the back of the restaurant, I instinctively followed.
As I came around the corner, there he was, standing near the window where the food comes out. I tapped him on the arm, and he whirled around to face me. “You speak Spanish?” he asked, in Spanish of course—something like “hablaespanol” except with a few more words mixed in.
I know just enough Spanish to be dangerous, so I answered, “Poquito.”
That’s when he went into a hyper-long, hyper-fast chatter, saying things in Spanish that I couldn’t understand because he was speaking way too fast. Then he unzipped his jacket—a short-waisted, jungle-green military style that looked like it came straight out of Fidel Castro’s closet—whipped out a Bible, and said, “something, something…misionario.”
My jaw slid out of place. I pointed at myself. “Yo tambien,” I whispered.
Normally I wouldn’t have said I was a missionary, but I’d just gotten back from the Oklahoma trip, and I had been thinking about doing more mission trips. Particularly, one mission trip.
The World Race.
Up to that point I’d been conflicted about applying for the World Race. It’s a long trip (11 months), and I’d told my mission leader in OKC that I’d always wanted to do the Eastern Europe route. Well, that route was full. There was, however, a new Spanish route that went into Central and South America: Bolivia, Honduras, El Salvador…Ecuador.
Okay, so maybe it might be interesting, but it wasn’t Eastern Europe. That’s where I really wanted to be. Still, I kept feeling drawn to the Spanish route. I had looked at the World Race page while in OKC, analyzing the map of where I would go. I never felt too excited about it, just…obligated somehow. And although I had been mulling over the idea, I refused to take any real action because whenever I thought about applying, worries as big and heavy as the world would overwhelm me. Almost all of those worries involved money. The mission was $13,500–so how was I going to pay for it? What about my job? What about my student loans? How was I going to pay those for 11 months? None of it seemed realistic. Latin America wasn’t where I wanted to be, I didn’t have the resources to go, I couldn’t speak Spanish that well—and yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Strange that a Spanish-speaking Latino man who looked like he’d escaped from a Venezuelan military camp had suddenly shown up at Panera Bread while I just so happened to be there, and while all of this had been weighing on my mind.
My Spanish skills really are pretty poor, so it was difficult for me to communicate with the Latino man. Luckily there was a family sitting at a nearby table who spoke both English and Spanish, and they translated what the man was saying. “He’s from Ecuador,” the mother of this family explained. The man continued talking rapidly. The woman had no problems keeping up. “He’s been traveling for 3,000 miles by bus, by train…he’s walked much of the way.” The translation continued. “He’s been injured. Someone hurt him. He’s trying to get to Dallas, so he needs money for a bus ticket…. But what he’s asking for right now, more than anything else, is for someone to pray for him.”
I didn’t have any money, but I’d been part of a praying machine in OKC. Our group prayed for anyone and everyone we came across. We prayed before starting our day, before cleanup assignments, after those assignments. We prayed in CVS for a woman whose arm was injured from something completely unrelated to the tornado. We prayed for storm victims, those people helping the victims. We prayed for ourselves. We prayed for each other.
It was a crash course in praying, and it was all fresh in my mind and on my heart. So if anyone was prepared to pray for this Ecuadorian man, by golly it was me.
I led him outside—his name was Jorge—and began the prayer. At one point I switched to Spanish, just to say “his heart” (su corazon). Jorge stopped me. “No no no!” he said. “All in English!” He pointed heavenward. “To honor God.” We were standing toe-to-toe, hands clasped in front of us. He shook out my arms, bowed his head, and nudged me to begin again. I spoke in English the whole way through, praying my heart out that he would make it to Dallas and that the Lord would put people in his path to help him. I prayed for his safety and for the Lord to reveal Himself in a real way so Jorge would know He was always there.
When I finished, Jorge hugged me then sat me down and wrote some Bible versus on a small pamphlet called LA UNICA PUERTA. He made me promise—and I mean promise, while holding a hand out to the sky as if calling upon God Himself—that I would read those verses once we parted ways.
I did. Those verses were everything I needed to hear, and from that moment on I was a changed person. I felt different, like my eyes and ears were finally open. Like my heart was open. It was like I’d awaken from a coma, like I’d been blind my entire life but now could finally see—it’s exactly like Isaiah says in one of the Bible verses Jorge gave me:
We grope like the blind along a wall, feeling our way like people without eyes. Even at brightest noontime, we stumble as though it were dark. Among the living, we are like the dead (Isaiah 59:10).
The other verses gave me great comfort and are what ultimately convinced me to apply for the World Race regardless of the nuances of my financial situation:
Now don’t worry about a thing, my daughter. I will do what is necessary, for everyone in town knows you are a virtuous woman (Ruth 3:11).
I will be your God throughout your lifetime—until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you (Isaiah 46:4).
The verse from Joshua was more instructive; and although it comforted me, it also seemed to contain pretty explicit directions:
Study this Book of Instruction continually. Meditate on it day and night so you will be sure to obey everything written in it. This is my command—be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the LORD your God is with you wherever you go (Joshua 1:8, 9).
And then there was the one, single verse from the New Testament: Hebrews 13:5. Is it a coincidence that Paul is my favorite Apostle and that I connect more with his epistles than any other books in the Bible? Is it a coincidence that $13,500 is exactly what I need for the World Race’s Spanish Route? That’s THE only route that costs that amount, by the way. All the others are $15,500.
And the verse itself—well, it just so happens to be about money:
Don’t love money; be satisfied with what you have. For God has said, “I will never fail you. I will never abandon you.”
And you know what else? If you look a liiiittle bit farther back in that passage, just two verses up from Hebrews 13:5, guess what Paul says?
Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done so have entertained angels without realizing it! (Hebrews 13:3).
Well there you have it. This is my testimony, the full reason why I felt called to do the World Race. Was Jorge an angel? Did God send him to give me a message? Or was he an angel in the metaphoric sense, another Christian who gave me what I needed so I could make the right decision? Personally, between you and me, I think he was real. There’s simply no other explanation for how such a powerful and near-instant transformation happened to me. Something changed that day, and it was only then that I finally realized: it’s not about what I want, where I want to be, the things I want to do. So I’m going on this mission, and I’m doing it for the very best reason of all:
To honor God.
Isaiah 6:3
