As I have lived in Guatemala what now seems like only a few days I have discovered a lot about myself and about God. First I discovered how truly powerful and great our God is. Secondly, I discovered that I’m not perfect and never will be. Also I discovered how the bare minimum soon became a home for 28 people.
In this first week I’ve seen a local on a bus give his life to Christ. I’ve prayed over Guatemalans, prayed over our home, and put a pretty strong faith in Christ. For a while I felt that I wasn’t supposed to come to Guatemala. I thought that it wasn’t meant for me, but God pressed deep into my heart and mind that it was exactly where I was meant to be.
I remember the night I realized why I was here. It was actually our first night and we had some spiritual warfare happening all night. I remembered waking up to the sound of someone walking around me but no one was there. I just kept praying for God to protect me and this house and everyone in it. As a series of events happened days in a row I knew God wanted me here for this specific reason. I was here to decide if this Christian life style was worth the fight, to see if I was willing to be completely bare with Christ and pick up his armor of protection and truly embrace it.
After one evening we had some major spiritual attacks on a team member I honestly felt numb to everything. I just couldn’t speak or process what just happened. Then a team member asked me if I was okay, and I can honestly say I wasn’t. I felt so broken and lost. I sobbed more than I ever have in my life. I didn’t have words to express what I had seen or experienced. But I knew one thing from all of it, that my God, he was so much bigger than all this. He was there in that small eight by eight room, in me and in my team members.
I can say now that living here hasn’t been easy for me, in fact it has been very hard. When you give up a bed for a concrete floor, warmth for freezing nights, tile/wood floor for cement and dirt, you just feel out of place. But throughout every difficulty I have experienced I realized something very prominent. I am here doing HIS will, teaching HIS word, living for HIM. So if giving up every comfort I have and learning to embrace this culture will change others lives here in this country, I am more than willing.
“Opportunities to make someone else’s life better were so much more attractive to me than the thought of the comforts I once knew. The longer I stayed, the more I realized that deep fulfillment had begun to swallow my every frustration. No matter how many contradictions I struggled with, how difficult certain situations were, no matter how lonely I got, no matter how many tears I cried, one truth remained firmly grounded in my heart: I was the center of God’s will; I was doing what I was created to do.”
