This is PART II of my blog post about the good, the hard, and the weird of my World Race. This post is dedicated to the hard stuff I experienced.
THE HARD
Team changes were hard. Way harder than I expected. We changed teams every four months, and the changes were decided by our team and squad leaders. We didn’t have a say.
My first team, Hijas del Rey, was very special. We had a unique and powerful mix of spiritual giftings that the squad leaders took notice of right away. One of the mentors from Launch even prophesied the word “power” over us.
The prophecy was right. We were a powerhouse team, full of members willing to go deep with the Lord, explore our spiritual gifts, try new things, and just love each other well. We prayed for each other a lot, and we were so close we turned the word hija(which means daughter) into a verb.
Hijas del Rey, ready for church in Mayaguez, P.R.
So when we would take group photos or do group hugs – whenever we’d have those “awwww!” moments with each other – our squad mates would say we were “hija-ing.”
I spent the first part of this crazy, wonderful mission – Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, and Peru – getting to know and love these girls. Then team changes were announced. I knew nothing about them until sometime into Peru, when the subject came up amidst conversation. Up to that point I didn’t even realize changing teams was a possibility.
But that’s exactly what happened. The whole squad experienced team changes, and my next four months of the Race (Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua) were spent with my next team: Abundant Joy.
Each member of Team AJ got along really well. We were all able to find ways to relate to each other, and we had a lot of fun together, but we just didn’t go deep like Hijas. Our dynamics were sometimes off, too, and we noticed it was challenging to move forward with solutions to certain issues.
Team AJ’s last month together was in Nicaragua, my hardest month on the Race. I struggled. Boy, did I struggle. We were stationed with a very conservative church in Jinotepe, and ministry wasn’t anything I was accustomed to. Often we we would visit people’s houses, but they were always members of the church (we rarely visited with people who weren’t already Christians, so it didn’t feel like true evangelism).
The cement enclosure where Team AJ and I stayed
in Jinotepe, Nicaragua
Also, when we did these home visits, I didn’t get a sense of Jesus’ love being shared with these people. Instead, the pastor wanted us to focus on telling people to come to church.
I’m all about church, because I know the power of community. It takes community to make it in this dark world, and community can be used to encourage and inspire each other.
With that said, many of these people were working hard just to scrape by, with long work hours, little income, and very little free time. One lady was already coming to church once or twice a week, but the pastor insisted she needed to come every day.
This was really hard for several of us to digest. It was even harder to be a part of it. Jesus taught me a lot through it, though, and I tried my best to love on the people we visited and pray for them in a way that reinforced God’s love and grace.
That and leaning into God were the only ways I made it through some of this ministry. God showed me so much that month, and some of those lessons gave me more insight into the issues we have in Christ’s Church. Sometimes people get so caught up in legalism that we forget God’s laws of grace and mercy.
As followers of Jesus Christ, this should never happen. We should never give too much space to manmade regulations and traditions, placing more emphasis on those things rather than the love Jesus commanded us to have for each other. But the truth is, this happens more often than we’d probably like to admit.
Being a new believer, I appreciated these lessons very much because I was oblivious to some of the problems the Church experiences. Jesus is really good at loving people where they’re at. After Nicaragua, I realized I had a long way to go in this area, too, especially when it comes to those closest to me.
I could have been loving my teammates better that whole time we were together, but instead I was expecting them to come to my level (just the way the pastor was expecting that one lady to come to his level).
All of this has made me determined to love people more, to try harder to be like my Lord and Savior, and to encourage others to keep their eyes fixed on Jesus instead of mortal men (even if those men are leaders or pastors of the church we attend and trust).
It’s also further convicted me to watch out for the trap the Pharisees fell into. Nobody wants to believe Jesus is talking to us when He confronts the Pharisees in Matthew 23. But whenever we turn away from the Spirit and place our hopes, instead, on legalism and manmade ideas, we have indeed fallen into that same trap.
Stay tuned for the third and final part of this blog post, where I’ll talk about all the weird, crazy, funny stuff that’s happened on my World Race.
Don’t worry about anything. Pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank Him for all He has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:6-7
