Praise God for a great flight over. Check-in was great in Birmingham and getting into Tegucigalpa was smooth. We got off the plane, grabbed our luggage, went through the easiest customs check ever, and went outside to find three yellow school buses waiting to take us to our hotel and a cargo truck waiting to take our luggage to the same place.
The first things I see when I walk out side: Burger King, Church’s Chicken, Baskin Robbins, Pizza Hut, Little Caesar’s and Dunkin Donuts! How awesome is that?!?!?! For a lover of food like me, this was a gift from God.
We got on the bus, yep “the Big Yellow Dog”. I felt like I should be toting a big black garbage bag of rolled up butcher paper with “Tame the Tigers” on it. It definitely sent me back a few years to high school. However, not one bus I had ever ridden around on through the streets of “Metro-Jackson” ever had “rims” like these nor a booming stereo system and tinted windows. It was a culture shock…even for this Jacktown girl.
The driver was crazy…not mentally…he just drove crazy. And he was not afraid to test his horn either. In fact, not one person on the streets was. And we found out quickly that stop signs and traffic lights were really just suggestions. (Throughout the week we were shocked when we actually stopped at a red light and we only saw one wreck the whole seven days we were there.)
It was surprising how much English I saw too. Sherwin Williams. Wait! There’s a Marriott?!?!?! In Honduras?!?! I was expecting much worse. Then I look off into the distance and the Lord says to me, “Is this more along the lines of what you were expecting?” Tons of shack houses right on top of each other. And when I say “right on top of each other”, I mean it. It looks like a bunch of pieces of metal and plywood and just stuff piled up. This is what people lived in.
After many twists and turns in the streets of Tegucigalpa, we reached our hotel, but backing up this alleyway at least a quarter of a mile, nonetheless. After being given room assignments, Emily and I hear that we are in a suite with all six of the other girls who are in our group. We had no idea that we would all be together in the same room. Now, when I hear the word “suite”, I’m thinking, “Ok, Hampton Inn type suite. Two full/queen beds, a TV, and a mini fridge.” Much better than the hostel I though we would be staying in. When we reach room 406, we open the wooden double doors to what looks to us like a presidential suite. This is awesome! God just keeps surprising me! This is the Plaza compared to most places I stay in on trips within the U.S. There were two bedrooms with two beds, a cot, and a balcony each, two bathrooms with oversized tubs, a kitchen and a super-sized mini fridge.
We settle in, finding a plethora of bottled water, Coca-Cola Classic and Coca-Cola Light (Diet Coke for us Americans). Emily and I check the view from our balcony – if you look straight ahead, it’s pretty neat. A nice cityscape with mountains in the background. Look straight down and you find a trash heap. Nice… but I digress. Off the kitchen area balcony, there’s a view of the pool area. There’s a cage down there with four exotic birds in it. One says, “Hola!”
Moving onward…our room becomes the place to be. We had an “open door policy”, as we kept both doors open so that everyone who walked by would be jealous. Just kidding. It did become the place that we would meet every night for debriefing and devotion.
The luggage comes next followed by dinner. Pizza…Dominos! After eating pizza, our group of 12 was off to our mission – Communion Baptist Church. This was the church we would be supporting and empowering throughout the week. The other group of 100 would be supporting Luz y Verdad Church.
We had our own bus. It was a small touristy type bus, complete with air conditioning. Needless to say, the other group was quite jealous considering they had the “yellow dogs” all week.
As we got on our bus, we met Carrie, who would be our leader for the trip. She is from Tennessee and is engaged to Eric who just joined the Global Missions Staff at Brookhills. They are getting married in September. She’s been on five or six trips before so she came to help out. We also met Archie, who happens to be from Venezuela. He’s our videographer for the week and will be putting together our video of the trip. He’s actually here training Hondurans on the video equipment as well.
So onto Communion we go, but Billy, our Global Missions Pastor, informed us that we weren’t supposed to get pizza because the wonderful people at Communion had prepared dinner for us. So we arrive to dinner numero dos – barbeque chicken with onions, bread, and the most amazing homemade mashed potatoes I have ever put in my mouth. We also met the pastor of Communion, Cesar Peña.
Next we learned we would be going to a church service outdoors. They wanted two people to give their testimonies, through translators, and then they wanted three of us girls who were in the choir to sing one of our Spanish songs. So Emily and Jason agreed to give their testimonies and Candace, Annette, and I decided to sing.
We drove up to the sight where the church service would be held – a fútbol (soccer) stadium. The church gets permission to use it every week and the people go around the neighborhood and invite people to come. So at first, we all go sit down on the concrete “bleachers”, which is a series of steps, and we just begin to survey the scene.
Soon enough we were swarmed by Honduran children, all under the age of nine, and speaking faster than our ears can hear and our brains can translate. Through a series of rough questions, and asking and listening, over and over, I connected with a boy named Marcos; he had a homemade kite and was very much into showing it off. Then he asked me something I’ll never forget, “¿Es usted un cristiana?” After not knowing many of the questions he asked before, this one came clearly through. I gladly answered, “Christiana? Christian? Me? ¡Sí! ¡Sí! ¿Y tu?” (I asked him if he was a Christian) And he answered with the biggest smile, “¡Sí! ¡Es verdad! ¡Sí! (Yes! It’s true! Yes!)”
Members of the church began to lead the crowd in singing some very cool Spanish praise songs. We all followed along as best we could. Next, Emily and Jason gave their testimony and soon after it began to rain. Needless to say, the rain cut short the service and the three girls didn’t get to sing.
When things had wrapped up, we said our goodbyes with the boys that had been sitting with us and invited them to church in the morning. I couldn’t get little Marcos out of my head and the question he asked me. My expectation was that I was there to make sure he was a Christian and the tables had quickly turned to him making sure that I was one.
At that point, God smacked me. Well, more like a love pat. God said, “See Katie…you had expectations of what you were going to experience. I’m doing something that you don’t even know about. Just look around this week. You’ll begin to see it!”
I suddenly realized how wrong I was. We are definitely here to spread the gospel and make God’s glory known, but we are going to do it the way He wants it to be done. No expectations. Just obedience.
May prayer for tomorrow:
God wake me up in the moring speaking Spanish fluently. Ha! Ok, maybe not. But seriously, Lord help me not to create expectations for this trip. Help me to put aside all stereotypes and all the things I think I know, in order for you to fill me with what you want me to know. I ask that your will be done through is, whether it brings me out of my comfort zone or not. And I’ll rest in the knowledge and hope that your grace is sufficient to give me the wisdom and an open heart/mind/eyes/ears to know when and where you are working and how to respond.
I do want to share the day's devotion with you as I close out each post. They were so applicable to what we were doing each day and can be so applicable to our everyday lives.
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