It's been waaaay too long since I've posted. So, in a somewhat desparate effort to keep this somewhat current, I'm reprinting here an article on our Guatemala Mission trip from the May 2008 Marine View Press. Hopefully, more will be forthcoming soon!
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Our mission team is back from Guatemala, and we are praising God for a wonderful and eventful trip. As a team, we can testify that God was faithful from beginning to end. We successfully installed over 90 stoves in homes in the remote village of Yuljobe. We gave each family we worked with a Spanish children’s Bible. We gave away over 160 bags of supplies and toys to the school children. We witnessed a contextualized movie presentation of the Prodigal Son and the preaching of the Gospel to the villagers in their native language, Q’anjob’al. We enjoyed gracious hospitality, deepened relationships with one another, and new friendships with our Guatemalan sisters and brothers in Christ. And we did it all without serious illness or injury to any team member.
Behind all of this, we are sincerely thankful for the prayers and for the physical and financial assistance we received both from Marine View and from people around the nation who responded to our support letters. We know that we could not…we did not…do it alone. Now, after months of work and anticipation, many meetings, and lots of prayer and planning, it is difficult to believe that it is over.
And yet, the mission is not completely over.
Although we were impacted in different ways and different degrees, this mission trip caused each member of the team to evaluate his or her life in light of what we experienced. For me personally, God opened my eyes to new dimensions of poverty. But it’s not what you might expect. Having been to Guatemala previously, I had already seen firsthand the impoverished conditions in which so many people live. In this regard, this year’s trip reinforced my gratitude to God for the material blessings I enjoy but frequently take for granted—it is only by God’s grace that I have received such undeserved wealth as citizen of the U.S. The new lesson in poverty actually came not as I looked at the lives of the villagers of Yuljobe, but as I looked back from their village to our lives in the States.
We are much poorer than we realize. With our material wealth we can distract ourselves and numb ourselves, but we truly live in a relationally and spiritually impoverished world. We have difficulty seeing it because we are immersed in it, but looking in from the outside it is plain to see that we are missing a lot. In Yuljobe, there is a rich, deep, and natural sense of community—they know one another, support one another, and share life with one another. Among Guatemalan believers, there is a rich, deep, and passionate love for Christ—they worship expressively, pray regularly, and speak openly about Jesus to others. I do not mean to romanticize their lives or downplay their hardships, but the rich relationships and spirituality displayed by those we encountered in Guatemala make me yearn for more of that in Tacoma.
More than once, our mission team reflected on the Scripture, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us” (2 Co. 5:20). In going, we sought to represent Christ to all those we met in Guatemala, sharing the love and truth of the Gospel with our words and our actions. In returning, we seek to bring to you the profound messages and lessons God impressed upon us while we were there. In a very real way, we are all now missionaries to our own homeland.
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