Some mission trips are about a moment. This one was about a list.
Our team spent the week working alongside our partners at Mount Olive Church and their pastor, TJ McAmis. They came home with seven numbers, and every one of them is a stack of stories. Here they are.
360 patients served medically. Not a statistic, a line. People who waited, sometimes a long time, to have someone look at them and take it seriously.
130 pairs of eyeglasses distributed. This is the one we can't stop thinking about. Somewhere in Honduras there are 130 people who put on a pair of glasses and watched the world sharpen up. Some of them had probably stopped expecting that to ever happen.
340 kids reached with the good news of Jesus. Told in a way a kid can actually hold onto.
60 families fed in El Limón. A week's worth of not worrying about one thing.
70 pastors and leaders trained. This is the number that outlives the trip. Our team spent real time with the people who will still be there in five years, doing the work every single week without a visiting team to help.
30 churches ministered to. Encouraged, resourced, reminded they aren't alone.
43 confessions of faith. Forty-three people who decided, in one week, to follow Jesus.
Read that list again and notice what it's made of. Almost none of it is preaching. It's medicine, and glasses, and groceries, and sitting with a tired pastor. The kind of thing that says you matter before anybody says a word about God.
That's not a strategy. That's just how Jesus did it. He fed people and healed people and then, once they trusted him, he told them the truth.
If you gave toward this trip, prayed for this team, or drove somebody to the airport, this is your list too. Thank you.
See the full photo album: https://flickr.com/gp/highlandsfellowship/35Qm19HSN3
A few questions worth sitting with
- When was the last time somebody helped you with something practical, and what did that do for how you saw them?
- Who in your life needs to be taken seriously before they need to be told anything?
- What's a skill you already have that somebody, somewhere, actually needs?