A Clamor

After growing up with brothers, since college I have lived with several different groups of wonderful women. A few months in to each new living situation, my mom gets a text along the lines of “These girls and their emotions are making a mess. I know I have the emotional range of a toaster, but really they just need to get their act together.” (Yes-she got one of these texts tonight.) This strange quality of being distant and cold hearted is also what makes me stable, strong, and persevering. I’m not driven by passing passions or bursts of emotion. When I get knocked down, I allow myself to be picked back up because at the end of the most horrible of days my hope rests in the all-powerful, eternally faithful God. Amen.

But most humans are not like me. The Old Testament describes the people of Israel crying out to God, raising a clamor to His ear. We sometimes have prayer sessions like this as a team. We all pray out loud at the same time. Some people cry or sing. I talk. I talk out loud, but I struggle to get impassioned. God’s hears what I say no matter how I say it, so why can’t we just have a nice chit chat? Nice, calm, logical. It is logical for me to have faith in God because He has proven Himself to be faithful. We’ve had some rough times already in Cordoba, but God obviously worked out a few miracles to get me here so I know He has a plan. He has big dreams for Cordoba. Someone once pointed out that if the Israelites hadn’t kept a record of their failures, we wouldn’t even have an Old Testament. We, the Cordoba team, have failures on our record. We have sin, rookie mistakes, and well planned attempts that simply bombed. After four months we are revising our revisions and still coming up empty handed.

I felt the full weight of this about a week ago. Beaten down, optimism waning, no change in sight. And then I felt it. Desperation. It feels like heaviness. It’s the feeling that accompanies the logical understanding that we can’t accomplish our goals without God. We can’t accomplish anything without God. Our goals or His. And I started to raise a clamor. I started to cry and plead. “God, do something! What we’re doing isn’t working.” There was no lightning or parting of waters, but that heaviness has stuck with me. I think I found an emotion. I don’t mind it.

English class

At the beginning of last week, Jaci and I set a goal for how many new people we wanted to meet and start talking to about God. And then the week started. Jaci ended up in extra meetings during the first part of the week, and then Hadassa got sick limiting our opportunities to go out into the city together. I tried to find ways to help or seek help from my teammates, but between our different meeting and class schedules, it just didn’t work out. Bible studies, English classes, discipleship classes, personal visits, church services all went really well, we just didn’t have much time to meet new people. However, when we got to the end of the week, we found we had more than surpassed our goal. In fact, after putting in fewer hours focused on making new contacts, we had one of our most fruitful weeks so far. Now doesn’t that sound just like God?

Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it; unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman keeps awake in vain. Psalm 127:1

Dinner with friends

This week we have scheduled some times to meet with these newest of friends, along with another goal of new people to meet. Please pray for these women: Fernanda, Eugenia, and Maru-a former Jehova’s Witness and her Catholic mother and friend who want her to find a “new spiritual walk,” Marta and Daniela-a mother and daughter in a large family with large needs, and Tamara, Magali, Daniela, and Natividad-young women searching for love, purpose, and success. Thank you for all your prayers for our team. We are really trying and really failing and really seeing God fight for these souls. Thank you for your faithfulness.

Our first men's group, but Javier wanted to bring his girlfriend
so Jaci and I went too and then we held hands in a picture.

Side note: Ashley, Jaci, and I were sitting in the church Friday afternoon waiting for some new furniture to be delivered (thank you Lewiston First!) when this woman walked in. She explained that she had been walking by when the Holy Spirit told her to come in and introduce herself. She is a member of the largest Christian church in Cordoba and she lives nearby. She had seen our sign one day from the bus and God had told her that this place was “a door to heaven” (not like a secret portal but more like a place that is full of God’s presence). She said she wanted to pray with us, but she kept getting distracted asking us questions and giving us advice. Eventually, she started to get a vision and interrupted herself by switching into a prayer. She thanked God for what He was revealing to her-that He is going to use our church in powerful ways. She slipped into tongues and then back into Spanish, “Que fuerte! Que fuerte!” (this vision is so strong) She thanked God again, blessed us, exchanged phone numbers, and left. It was an unusual but powerful and timely confirmation of what God has already told us: no matter how we feel, this project is going places because it is His project.

Bible study