What Next

The kids in Membrillal saying good bye to Candace

Well, I am back in Illinois and I have to say that in some ways it feels like I was gone for years but in others, it feels like I just left yesterday. I certainly have mixed emotions about my return. I missed my family and friends here and am grateful for the opportunities to reunite that I will have in the next few days. At the same time, I am missing Guatemala and my friends there. The upside to living in two different places is that I am surrounded by friends wherever I am. The downside is that I am only surrounded by some of them and am missing the others. I guess that is why this world could never be our home. We were designed for eternal relationship not separation.

This summer, I had the chance  to spend time with the kids at the schools more than any previous trip. I got to play with them and hopefully show them the love of a Heavenly Father that enjoys them. 

 There were several times that I was able to be at the schools without a specific construction task. The kids would come and just want to play, watch a video on the tablet or have me take pictures of them. I have tried to share some of them but no picture could do justice to the fun that I was having. I believe that in the future this playful expression of the Father's love will become a bigger part of what God is calling me to. I do not know exactly how that will look but I continually see kids reaching out for loving. playful attention. I am excited to see where this leads.

Summer Crew 2014

As for the future, I am not sure what it will be. Right now, I am thinking, planning and praying about where to go next and what to do. I cannot share all of my plans at this time but feel like the next step is to go to language school in January. I have gone before but went in an area that was heavily populated by English speakers and I did not become immersed. This time, I am praying about going to Quetzaltenango in January to begin studying. If I am going to be able to minister in word as well as action, I need to speak Spanish much better than I do right now. After that I would begin working with teams again.

Some of our Galilea Team

I am asking all of this to keep me in prayer. I need wisdom and discernment to know God's leading in all of this. He has a plan. I have seen glimpses. I know what is in my heart and believe that it is aligned with His will.Please pray that I am in step with God and His timing. Thank You for your continued love, encouragement, prayer and support.

The World Needs Fathers

One of my favorite speakers over the years is a man name Jack Frost. He died several years ago but his ministry on discovering the Father's love has spoken to me many times over the years. I loved being where he was because of the sense of confidence that came from him as he spoke. He was so free and secure in who his Father had made him that he was unreserved. There were times that I saw him come out into a crowd and sit on another man's lap just to make his point clear. He talked a lot about being at home in love. This is a message that I think everyone needs to hear.

This summer, the words of Jack Frost have really began to take root in my life. Another man, John Washko, came to my Church just before I was preparing to come to Guatemala in the Spring. He said that he felt like God was showing him a picture of me as Papa Jorge and that kids, needing a father would begin to come to me. As with any word that people give to me, I put it on the shelf and prayed about it. Throughout the spring, as I went to the schools kids would high five me or fist bump but that was about as deep as it got. When I came home for a few weeks, I wondered if I had missed something. I was a little sad.

WOW, did God have something in store that completely caught me off guard! These last few months, kids just came to me. When I was reading, they wanted to see everything that my tablet could do. When I was sitting, they wanted to play. No matter what my reason for being at the schools, the kids just came to me. One day, I spent about two hours under a pile of kids that just swarmed around me while I was trying to read. Another day, they wanted me to slide down the wooden ramp and life them up to hang on a suspended walkway. For hours these things went on. Now I am having to be careful where I am when I go to the schools so I am not disruptive to the class.

Some of these kids have no dad in their lives and others have dads that have to be away from home for long periods of time to find work but cannot afford to take the families with them. I am seeing the need for substitute fathers to step in here just as much as I am seeing it in Illinois. If kids are ever going to have a good view of God as a heavenly Father, they are going to need people to demonstrate what that looks like to them. My role right now is to show them an adult man that just loves them and enjoys being around them, in supervised conditions of course. There are enough predators around that they need to experience this in a safe, controlled environment.

At the same time, God is showing me fears and insecurities in my own life that He needs to deal with. He has shown me areas where I have had a love deficit that will keep me from effectively loving these kids in the way that He desires to show Himself through me. Play and spending time with them is a first step. There is a need for something deeper and more substantial for them and I am just a part. I need to let the Holy Spirit deal with every area of my life where His love in me would be  blocked so I can be totally free and then, I need to let that love pour out of me so that they can know Jesus and He can be glorified in us all.

How are you doing today at being a vessel for the love of God to fill and overflow? I  need some work. 

How Do You Navigate?

This week has not been a normal team week for me. Usually when there is a team here, I am with them all of the time. I eat with them, work with them and drive them where they are going. This week started with me being separate from them for the first two days during their work time. Monday, I needed to take Patricia and her friend Joan to Zapote. they needed to visit our projects along with the Church and school and I had a couple of small projects to complete there. Tuesday, I needed to take Joan to the airport while they were out working in Membrillal.Both of these days had me driving more than working but I am here to do whatever they need.

While I was driving, I was thinking about how navigating here is different than at home. In Illinois, most of our roads and city streets are laid out on a grid.Navigation is usually pretty straightforward and does not require a lot of thought. Here, nothing is straight. I am often a landmark navigator. I turn at this building. I need to be in the right lane when I go past this spot to be prepared for the lane split ahead. Often, I determine my position by where I am in relation to a certain volcano or mountain. 

Yesterday there was a detour on the highway. The detour is actually the route that I usually take but because the main road was closed there was long delays. Because of the delays, I decided to take a route that I did not know. I knew that the Agua Volcano was south of Antigua and that I needed to go east until I was almost past it and hen go north. As we went through narrow streets in towns that I was not familiar with, I questioned my decisions several times until I started seeing familiar things. Even though I was not sure exactly where I was, I kept following the things I knew. After about 15 minutes, the same amount of time it would have taken without a detour, I would up where I thought I would.

This led me to ask: How does God lead me as I navigate through life? Is His word stored away so that I can call it up at the time I need it for a particular situation? Have I spent focused quiet time becoming familiar with the still small voice that the Holy Spirit usually uses?  Am I familiar enough with the way that I think to know the difference between my thoughts and Spirit inspired thinking? How many ways have I allowed God to develop in me so that I can discern where He is leading?

Just like I need to learn different ways of navigation that require different skills in Illinois and Guatemala, I need to allow God to develop different skills of discerning His will in me. Knowing and understanding Scripture is important. It is the basis for all discernment. Without sound Biblical understanding, we cannot trust anything else that we may here. We need to develop good Biblical knowledge just like we need to study a map before we go to a place and get lost. We also need to learn to distinguish the Holy Spirit speaking to us in thought, song, audible voice, impression or through others. If we do not learn and allow God to develop these things in us, we will frequently be wandering around trying to figure out the next step in life. If we develop these things, we can confidently take just the step that is in front of us at the moment, knowing that God will give us what we need after that when it is time. We no longer need to stress. We can rest in the leading of God and continue on until He tells us it is time to turn.

How are you navigating life today?

The Lost World

Lately, I have been asking why there is so much work going into the proclamation of the Gospel and yet there is often little fruit. The Good News of the Kingdom of God should transform everything that it touches. There is no better word than that Jesus came to seek and to save that which is lost. Not only that but He came bringing a Spirit of adoption so we could be restored to our rightful place as children of God. It seems like our societies are not only not being transformed but they are becoming more openly hostile to this Good News. Are we doing something wrong?

The first thing that came to me is that we are not pursuing unity. I am often comfortable with Christians that agree with me but have little fellowship with those who come from a different tradition or understanding than me. I tend to hold to what I have been taught and cling to the limited revelation that I have without allowing myself to see that others may have a different understanding of something than me and they may be the one that is right. I am not advocating abandoning truth but rather being open to the idea that God may not reveal all truth to any one person or group. Someone else may be given a revelation of something that I may not have received. If I don't acknowledge, honor and learn from them, I will have a more limited view of the truth of God. He created us to need one another.

You might ask how this hinders our proclamation of the Gospel. First,they see us as hypocrites and phonies. Because we do not work together in spite of our differences, They believe we are not following the one true God. The rift that exists because of our different understandings keeps the world from seeing past us to the see the God we serve. When the disciples approached Jesus about those who were speaking about Him but were not with them, Jesus said that whoever was not against Him was for Him. How could they speak against Him if they were doing miracles in His name. We need to adopt this attitude in the body. Even if someone is not in our fellowship or tradition, we need to publicly bless them because there is One Lord over all of us.

Secondly, they do not see love from us toward our brothers and sisters when we do not get past our differences to proclaim His truth corporately. When we look for reasons to be divided, the lost world will pick up on  that. They already experience enough separation and rejection. Why would they want to be part of a body that claims to love Jesus yet cannot get along with one another. The world has enough strife without the Church adding to it. This theme is repeated in almost every chapter of 1 John. We need to take it to heart.

The other thing that has really struck me is how devoid of emotion much of my Christian walk is. I know the truth of God on an intellectual level. I study His word and know that it is true but I am unwilling to let my senses be overwhelmed by His majesty, glory, might, beauty or even terror. God is so much more than my finite mind can comprehend but yet He wants me to experience Him fully. Emotions and senses are to be as much a part of our Christian walk as intellect. His Spirit in me wants to work through all of these areas. How can God possess all of me if I do not allow these things to be involved in my walk with Him. The world needs to hear truth but they also need to see people overwhelmed by the bigness of God and not ashamed to let it be seen. Surrendering all of me means that God gets to reveal Himself to the world through every aspect of the life He has given me. 


We are between teams this week and this is what I have been thinking about the last few days. I have started to write this a few times but have to start over because I realized that my tone was one of accusation and that is the exact opposite of my desire. If you read this and you feel accused, I pray that you will know it is not my intention. What I am writing is born out of a conviction that God has placed in me over the last few days and months. If this causes you to question, I hope you do not feel condemned but rather, you come away with a feeling of hope for where God is leading.

Together as one in the proclamation of the Gospel.

Hard Work

There are many things that people think of when they think of missions. Often you have an image of sharing the Gospel through a translator, doing music and skits, preaching, and other similar things. These are part of missions, a very important part. What is overlooked though is that there are a lot of other things that go into missions that are just hard work or maybe a lot of down time.

Over the course of the last week, I have spend several days working in a town where the temperature flirts with the 100 degree mark daily, torn down a roach infested house, built two new houses, made 3 trips to the airport and one to the emergency room with a sick team member and spent a day in Antigua waiting while team members shopped in a market that I have been to countless times. These are all part of an ordinary week. sometimes, the only time that I share the Gospel is in conversations that I have with team members.

You might ask why those things are important or why am I wasting so much time with such little impact. The answer is because a lot goes into to preparing the way for the Gospel to be shared. Sometimes you have to build trust with people so that they will listen to what you have to say. Other times, people want to know that you love them before you can have any influence in their lives. You always have to help the people look after the people that come to help you out. None of these things is what you typically think of when the word missions is said.

Just like everything in life, missions is suppose to be about bringing glory to God above all and secondarily about helping Him bring people into His kingdom. If my goal is to accomplish a certain task, I will be frustrated often. My goal has become to ask God to show me how to do everything for His glory and to do it in a way that allows people to see Him in me. I am sometimes tired, sore, or bored but I have learned that I can have joy in the midst of it all. My job is to position myself in a place that Jesus can work through me. Do the things He gives me to do without complaining and do it to the best of my ability. If I can keep my eyes focused on Jesus, anything I do will build His kingdom.

Grumbling and Complaining

Last week was a busy week. We had a team come in on Friday, the 13th and start working the next morning on smoothing the roof of the Church building to make it more kid friendly since they are using the rooms and the open space more for Sunday School..We had to haul 35 . 100lb bags of cement along with countless buckets of sand and gravel to the third floor. The old surface had to be roughed up to accept new concrete and then we had to mix, carry and level all of that mix.

Throughout the following week, we worked on prepping for the foundation pour in Membrillal and building 2 stoves and a house in Zapote. The work is often tiring and tedious, whether you are digging and moving several dozen yards of dirt by hand or standing in one place all day tying re-bar for columns. I can say that in doing these things, the mind set on the flesh is death.

While I was working, I started noticing a pattern in my thought process. I always wanted to be doing what someone else was doing. If I was wheel-barreling, I wanted to shovel. If I was shoveling, I wanted to tie. If I was working on the house, I wanted to work on the stove. Contentment was never found when I focused on my work. The issue was, that I chose what I was doing. I would wait until all of the jobs were taken and look for what needed to be done so I willing chose to do what I was doing.

I started seeing how this plays out in all aspects of life. I frequently find myself comparing myself to others. What do they have that I do not? Why can they do something I cannot? Why did they get the job that I wanted? The devil brings these thoughts and jealousies in subtly. He does it in a way that we take ownership of them almost immediately and then dwell on them until they begin to consume us. Comparison is one  of the enemies worst schemes to destroy our lives.

As I recognized these thoughts, I started to see how to combat them. God is the one that has put me in this position. He has me there for a purpose. He is growing me into the person that I was created to be and I can praise Him for all of these things. He has not abandon me to be a manual laborer. He has made me a Kingdom builder. The work I do is all necessary for the building of His Kingdom in this place and it translates into a better inheritance for me as a joint heir with Jesus.

God does not need me, or any of us to accomplish His work on the earth. He could do the things that He has called us to more efficiently than we can do them. He brings us along like a Father bringing a child to work to learn the family business, assigning us tasks so that we can have the joy of accomplishment and a sense of belonging and ownership in what will be our inheritance. He gives us Kingdom building work because he knows it is important for us to learn that we have a place in His heart and in His creation. He calls us to do His work out of His overwhelming love for us. He does not need us to do it but we do need to do the work if we want to have assurance of our place in the kingdom of God.

If you get to feeling like me, remember that God is not using you because He needs you. he is giving you opportunities to grow as a son or daughter and learn to live in this community of family that is the Body of Christ. Stop comparing and complaining. Begin to praise God because he is making you into exactly what he has created  you to be.

Time to Quit Going to Church

I have been back in Guatemala for a few days now and have had a lot of time to read, pray and think. I have read several good books in the last week and they have stimulated much thought. Some of it has been good and other ideas have really challenged me. I just want to share one that is really sticking out to me these last few days.

It is time to stop going to Church. I have been in the habit of regular Church attendance for as long as I can remember. It has been a part of my life since I was to young to comprehend why were were going. There have been some Sundays that were fun, entertaining, enlightening and incredibly touched by God. There have also been some that were boring, dull and lifeless. Today, I decided it is time to stop going to Church. Many of you will ask why. Some may already be labeling me a heretic or at least a bad example to our kids. That is okay. If you feel that way. I am still not going to Church anymore.

What changes are we seeing in the world around us? Is going to Church making things better or worse? Is it having any effect on the way we live or the way society sees things. In all of the years of going to Church, can I truly say that I am salt and light? Has the world taken notice and submitted themselves tho the Lordship of Jesus? What good has it done the world hat I am there?

Well, you may ask what are my plans then. After all, I have spent most of my adult life in some form of ministry. What will I do now. I have decided to be the Church, the Body of Christ, or least the part of that body that I was called to be. I have a unique role in this body that only I have been created to fill. I intend to ask God to show more clearly what that will look like and then walk in it. To be the Church is to be a body, rightly connected to the Head, Jesus and fully functioning in everything that I was created for.

Going to Church lulls us to sleep. It makes us feel like we have completed an obligation for the week, maybe worshiped God or learned a previously hidden truth in His word. It does not transform the world. It is time to leave the pew behind and put our feet on the path of worship and service by filling our unique role in the body. I cannot tell you what your role is. That is the Holy Spirit's job, but when we each start fulfilling our role, the world will change and come alive.

I am not going to go to Church anymore but I will be gathering with my brothers and sisters on Sunday and throughout the week to join their voices in becoming one, united body. We will worship together, work together, eat together and fellowship in a way that Jesus is honored and we are drawn into our full potential as the Body of Christ. I will encourage my brothers and sisters to find their place in this body and help them as I receive their help also. I will be part of a living, dynamic organism made of numerous parts intertwined together for the glory of God.  Eph 2:11-22
Doesn't that sound much more exciting than going to Church?

Later this week, we will receive our first team of the summer. There is much to do. won't you pray for us as we begin this next chapter and won't you join me in being the body?