Back to Reality

I'm home now!

A week removed from the villages of Honduras where kids with tattered clothes and worn out shoes walked for what seemed like days through the coffee bean hills for school. Eager to learn basic math facts and parts of speech of their native language, they were intrigued by the truck full of "Americans" passing by their two room schoolhouse.

We parked the vehicles on a recently cleared plot of land and began to dismiss ourselves onto the dusty Honduran road toward the school. As we passed by a shed built with several timbers and an aluminum roof having wooden benches below, someone asked, "What's that?"

"It's the church!"

"Really," I thought to myself. "This is the ONE church in this village! A shed not much fit for keeping animals out of the rain is used to house people for weekly worship services! You can't be serious!" But that it was.

While I love to travel and spend days, even weeks, abroad experiencing diverse cultures, traditions, and languages, I never cease to be amazed and convicted by what I experience when my path crosses the way of Christians in those cultures.

During the week of our trip we were introduced to the work of three men who have given themselves to full time ministry. Pastors, if you will.

Not pastors in three piece suits attending meetings and public speaking engagements that may require using their private jet to get from one location to the next. No, perhaps their responsibilities looked to be more closely associated with Paul's travels in the book of Acts than the former.

From my own experience, we know what must be done yet oftentimes refuse to do so because of our apathetic tendencies. Maybe that's unfair to say. Maybe it's not that we don't care but that our schedules have been bombarded with secondary issues that we've made into an ultimate priority.

To be honest, that sounds pretty accurate for a large majority of our Christian sub-culture.

But how do we provide a more permanent presence in villages like El Ensenal who meet under a shed for their worship services?

While the church is a conglomeration of many people with diverse backgrounds, it is unified by God's singular mission of making Himself known to the world. And the leaders of the church have a responsibility of maintaining that unifying mission for the people who come under the name of Christ and His church.

At least for me, my conviction is planted in this mantra, "Go, send, or disobey!" And what spending a week in Honduras has done for me is help deepen the roots of that mission.

So, I'm back home. Back to reality. And what I will do is spend the next several days, weeks, months fighting back the urge of a self-inflicted drought toward the global mission of God. One that can become easily choked out by the weeds of my own comforts and conveniences. My busy schedule. Being entertained by the propositions of this world.

So I'm choosing to return and view my reality through a different lens. Rather than a lens that seems blurry or dim, I want to remain wide awake to the people and needs around me. One that chooses not to turn a deaf ear or blind eye to others' reality. But one that see others' needs and chooses to embrace and engage!