Begun in Faith

If work were a beach, teaching would be a beach covered with a million stones. You have nine months to move all the stones. Most of the time you feel like you’re behind schedule and the job will never be done. Starting a church is a beach with one stone that weighs a million pounds. We have two years to move the stone. We know that God called us to this task, so we go out everyday and pray for the stone. We look at it, walk around it, dream up and carry out ways to move it, push it, pull it, chip away a bit each day. And pray a lot. Teaching is harder because it’s labor intensive and constant. Being a missionary is harder because it’s just impossible. In my years of teaching I moved emotional and spiritual stones and built emotional and spiritual muscles: perseverance, faith, determination, hope, integrity, muscles that now help me chip away at the rock and, more than anything, stay on the beach. Because people have walked away. One of our teammates chose to leave the project in Novem

One of our first committed disciples was Laura. I don’t know why it took me so long to write her story, but I want to have it here. Junior and Jaci (our pastors) met her at an ice cream shop. She’s a single mom and was there with her four-year-old Sofi. While Sofi and Hadassa played, Jaci and Laura chatted about life and the church. Jaci told me about her the next day, and we tried for weeks to get ahold of her. We exchanged texts a couple times, but I was fairly convinced I would never see her in person. Then she showed up at a house of prayer (Bible study). She talked really fast, and I still didn’t understand Spanish very well. All I kept thinking was how much she looked like an angry kitten. She’s a small person, and she sat back a little ways from the table with her arms crossed. She spoke barely above a whisper which made it sound like she was spitting—spitting fire. I didn’t understand what it was that had evoked such wrath, but I knew I didn’t want to be on the receiving end o