Lessons from Nicaragua

As I write this, we are in our next country…Colombia! I meant for this to go out sooner, but with traveling and starting a new ministry, that didn’t happen so here we go! The month there went by fast and I learned things about myself and in my walk with the Lord. The following are in no particular order: 

1. I actually like playing sports when it’s not for competition. We spent a lot of time playing soccer and some baseball with boys from the formation program. (Fun fact: unlike most of Latin America, the national sport of Nicaragua is baseball.) I had a lot of fun playing with them. We weren’t competing, I wasn’t expected to perform well. There was lots of laughing and I found myself getting excited to play with them. 

2. The habits I form matter. Every day at school the boys started their day with a devotion. While we were serving, they asked us to give the devotional each day. We took turns giving devotions and I gave one on Daniel 6 (I gave the whole thing in Spanish ????). As I was reading it stood out that while Daniel was in Babylon he continued in the habits that he had formed when he was a boy living in Israel. Even though he had spent more time in exile then he had in Israel, the habits that he formed when he was young was what he used to model and shape for his life in Babylon. The habits I am forming now will shape my habits in the future. What I do in the mundane now will be how I act and respond in the future. I need to be more conscious of the small have a time forming that will lead to habits I have when I’m much older. 

3. I don’t want things for the sake of having things. We made house calls to the boys in the formation program and to the elderly. In both instances, we were checking on their well-being, living them, and praying for them. I noticed most of them don’t have much, especially compared to American standards. Yet, most of them were happy and content. Their houses were functional and they didn’t have things cluttering every inch of their small houses. I don’t have to fill every square inch of my place with things that I honestly don’t want just to say that I have things. I can choose to be intentional about what I keep  and how I arrange things so that it looks nice without being bare. 

4. Let the experience be what it is. I left the boys program one afternoon feeling really discouraged and defeated because it felt very similar to an experience I had in my own classroom back in the states. I was fed up and ready to be done, but a couple of girls from my squad came and talk with me. I was able to share why it was so hard and why I was putting so many expectations on myself. My squad leader shared some of the best advice I could’ve gotten. She told me to let this experience be what it is and stop comparing it to what I had experienced in the past or what I want to experience in the future. She told me to lean into the experience here and not miss how God is working in this moment by being caught up with comparing it to the experience I have had/want to have. By putting her advice into practice, I was able to be more present and engaged with the boys even on days that were harder because I was letting a new experience be formed.