I love new beginnings! I love the feeling of a fresh start and blank slate. I love that God promises us that each day is full of new mercies. I love the excitement that stirs in my heart about the unknown adventure that lies ahead. I love that feeling of stepping out in faith and watching the Lord pave the way each step...
And I'll never forget those first steps into our ministry in Honduras.
Let me preface this by saying that I knew when I met and married Rene that I was not just saying "I do" to the man that I would spend the rest of my life with, but I was also saying, "I do" to a lifetime of missionary service with him. Rene had shared with me that he had a calling to tell others back in his country of Honduras about the Lord and I had surrendered to the call to missions long before I ever met my dear husband, so I knew at some point in our lives, we would be Honduras bound.
But, you see, my husband asked me to marry him before I ever had the opportunity to meet his family. I said, "yes" before I ever laid eyes on the country that I would one day call "home".
So, we led our first mission trip to Honduras three weeks before my wedding. We arrived in Tegucigalpa with a team of college students. My future mother-in-law arranged it so that she was waiting on the landing strip when our plane arrived. I hugged my future family for the first time. We travelled across country to a small city where we rented a cattle truck and all climbed in the back to continue our journey another several hours to a small town. We camped out and the next day, we hiked and hiked and hiked to a very remote village. It really did seem like the "end of the earth" to me. All the while, I was soaking in the scenery! Beautiful mountain ranges and green valleys, security guards with machine guns standing in front of grocery stores and banks, tiny people scarred by the toils of life, men that wore straw hats so that their skin was protected by the sun and women that wore bright colors and covered their hair. I saw new foods and smelt new smells and experienced coke being served in plastic bags with a straw. Strange things. The people in that village had very little from a worldly perspective. They had the clothes on their backs and most of them didn't even have shoes on their feet. They even referred to their birthdays as "the day the corn was harvested" rather than a date.
I saw a lot of new things for me. But up there in that tiny village I saw something I didn't expect, something I had never seen before: I SAW VISION and I FELT CALLING! It took effort on our part to get to that village. It also took a lot of resources. We gave these people a lot of things. We washed the ladies' hair as lice crawled up our arms. We passed out shoes and clothes. But more than all this, we shared HOPE with them. We shared Jesus! The clothes we passed out would one day wear thin and the shoes would one day be outgrown or worn out and even the rice and beans would only last a couple of meals, but JESUS will be around for all of eternity! So, we shared with them and the words of the scripture, "the poor people of this world will be rich in faith," took on a whole new meaning to me. My first steps to a new land were greeted with initial elation and calling and the calling is what held me through every other stage of CultureSHOCK.
