Lessons Illuminated

Mami Sonia, me, and Mami Sara in Bluefields, Nicaragua

The view from our panga ride on the river

(Back:) Mami Sonia, Diana (Sara's daughter), Vladimir (Diana's boyfriend), Manuel (Sara's son), Mami Sara; (Front:) Gabriel (Sara's grandson), Justin (Sara's grandson), and Vicki (Sara's daughter) 

Gabo and me--Gabriel was my beach buddy and faithful little body guard during my whole stay

Parading Jesus through the streets on Easter

A little friend we encountered

The Bluff

Another swimming spot in Bluefields

Hello All,


I have been back from Nicaragua for nearly a week although that is hard to believe since it has been very busy. The trip was very good although the travel itself was very long. It takes two six-hour bus rides and a two-hour panga or small boat ride to travel from Tegucigalpa to Bluefields, Nicaragua, where Mami Nelly and Mami Sara are from. It is more than 24 hours straight of traveling when you figure in the time waiting for the next bus. Raúl’s mom, Mami Sonia, accompanied me on the trip, and I was very proud of her stamina. I loved the panga ride. As we flew through the waters of the river with trees and small shacks and docks on either side of us, I just kept hearing the words of that song “Come Away” by Jesus Culture—Come away with Me. Come away with Me. It’s never too late. It’s not too late. It’s not too late for you. I have a plan for you. I have a plan for you. It’s going to be wild. It’s going to be great. It’s going to be full of Me. So, open up your heart and let Me in.


This trip was indeed a time to get away with God outside of what has become my normal sphere of life in Honduras. I hate to say that I needed the rest because at times I feel like I don’t do anything taxing, but at the same time, the restoration and renewed spiritual enthusiasm I felt after returning was proof to me that I had gotten tired. Even though it boggled Mami Sonia’s mind how much time I could spend reading the Bible and writing in my journal, I was so grateful for the time to just saturate myself like a sponge with the hope I find in Christ. It was uplifting to be around Sara as always, and I was so grateful for her generosity and hospitality.


While in Nicaragua, I started reading Henri Nouwen’s book, Gracias, a kind of journal from his time spent in Peru and Bolivia. I haven’t made much more progress in it since I’ve been back, but what I read there was good enough that I nearly wanted to copy the entire book into my journal because so many passages resonated with me. Here are a few:


I know that all who love God strive constantly to hear his voice more clearly (xiv).

While this may seem like such a simple concept, in the past couple months, I had found myself avoiding the voice of God because I wasn’t prepared to confront the things He wanted to show me within myself, because I was afraid that what He would tell me would create such painful longings in my heart for things that I can only believe for, and because I had begun to doubt my own capacity to recognize His voice. But, as is clearly evident here, if I truly love God, I have to be willing—and not just willing but purposeful in trying—to hear the voice of God more clearly all the time.

Peru: from the moment I entered it, I felt a deep love for this country. I do not know why. . . . I felt embraced by a loving people in a way I had not known before. . . . I had the strange emotion of homecoming. “This is where I belong. This is where I must be. This is where I will be for a very long time. This is home.” . . . for me it was a day of comfort and consolation, a day on which the decision to come to this country was affirmed. . . . On the evening of this first day in Peru, I had the sensation that all that I had heard and seen had a deep and old familiarity. Everything whispered, “Welcome home, my friend.” (2-4).

One of the greatest things that happened while I was in Nicaragua was experiencing homesickness for Honduras for the first time in seven months, since I moved. Everything that Nouwen expresses in this passage about his love for Peru echoes my own heart for Honduras. While I loved being in Nicaragua, being away only made me feel even more sure of my love and belonging to Honduras. The novelty of Honduras has completely worn off, but the love for this place remains. I was talking on the phone to Raúl while I was in Nicaragua and explained that while I liked Nicaragua, Honduras still felt like my home. Raúl replied by saying, “Good, then you’ll stay forever, right?”

True prayer always includes becoming poor. When we pray we stand naked and vulnerable in front of Our Lord and show him our true condition. If one were to do this not just for oneself, but in the name of thousands of surrounding poor people, wouldn’t that be “mission” in the true sense of being sent into the world as Jesus himself was sent into the world? . . . If God really exists, if he truly cares, if he never leaves his people alone, who is there to remind him of his promises? (11-12).

God is truly heightening my realization of the value of prayer. Sometimes, I tend to beat myself up because I’m not one to be sitting still in prayer for hours on end. But, then, I take a step back and realize that I am praying all the time. It isn’t always a conscious, “I’m going to pray right now”; instead, it’s usually just the ongoing conversation I have with God throughout every moment of the day about every little detail or every big event. With that said, I do want to become more purposeful in what I’m praying about, who I’m praying for, and interceding for the lost.

The poor themselves are the best evangelizers. . . . True liberation is freeing people from the bonds that have prevented them from giving their gifts to others. . . . It is hard for me to accept that the best I can do is probably not to give but to receive. By receiving in a true and open way, those who give to me can become aware of their own gifts. After all, we come to recognize our own gifts in the eyes of those who receive them gratefully. Gratitude then becomes the central virtue of a missionary (15-16).

One of the most rewarding aspects of living in a strange land is the experience of being loved not for what we can do, but for who we are. When we become aware that our stuttering, failing, vulnerable selves are loved even when we hardly progress, we can let go of our compulsion to prove ourselves and be free to live with others in a fellowship of the weak. . . . In the presence of God, we . . . realize that we can do nothing, absolutely nothing, without Him. . . . I, therefore, think that for those who are pulled away from their familiar surroundings and brought into a strange land where they feel again like babies, the Lord offers a unique chance not only for personal conversion but also for authentic ministry (18).


The great paradox of ministry, therefore, is that we minister above all with our weakness, a weakness that invites us to receive from those to whom we go. The more in touch we are with our own need for healing and salvation, the more open we are to receive in gratitude what others have to offer us. . . . In that sense, ministry becomes the skill of active dependency: willing to be dependent on what others have to give but often do not realize they have. . . . To go to the poor is to go to the Lord. Living this truth in our daily life makes it possible to care for people without conditions, without hesitation, without suspicion, or without the need for immediate rewards. With this sacred knowledge, we can avoid becoming burned out. The goal of education and formation for the ministry is continually to recognize the Lord’s voice, his face, and his touch in every person we meet (20).

When we have met our Lord in the silent intimacy of our prayer, then we will also meet him in the campo, in the market, and in the town square. But when we have not met him in the center of our own hearts, we cannot expect to meet him in the busyness of our daily lives (21-22).

All of the above echoes lessons that God has been teaching me over the last seven months. As we are headed into our busiest team season, I have to mentally prepare myself to receive that all-too-familiar question of: “So what is it that you do?” I have to deep sigh and try not to laugh every time that I prepare to answer because the truth is that I don’t really “do” anything worth noting. It’s not about me. The question of “Well, did you study or get any form of education?” is also common. (I did—I have a degree in secondary education which also spurs the question of, “Well, why aren’t you teaching?”) When I mention to Alvin how often I get these kinds of questions, he gets frustrated and says, “Well, why don’t people ask me those kinds of questions?” The answer, to me, is obvious. Alvin has lived and worked in Honduras long enough that he has a clearly observable ministry. He has some measure of tangible results for his toil. But Alvin and I both agree that we are not what we do. Alvin always encourages me by telling me that, to him, I am a fruit tree. When fruit trees are first planted, they don’t automatically bear fruit, and even if they do bear fruit fairly early, it’s not always the sweetest or the best developed fruit.

I recently had a conversation with one of my Danish “children,” where I just shared that I have learned that I am not here because of a job or because of anything that I think that I am accomplishing. I am here out of obedience to God. There are numerous dreams and visions for the future that I believe that God has for me in Honduras, but I have to learn to be faithful in the small things first. If I can’t demonstrate a servant’s heart in checking e-mails, translating for teams, cataloguing receipts, and just stopping to love the one person in front of me, how could I ever expect that God would give me more responsibility? I believe that this is a time of developing roots and permanence in Honduras, but my roots have to dig deeper and deeper into God before I (or anyone else) can really expect to see an abundance of fruit.

One of the things that I love about Henri Nouwen’s ministry in Peru is that he conducted his outreach with a sense of humility—not of overbearing imperialism but of dependency and weakness. The goal of the mission with which he worked was to find the gifts in others simply by seeing Jesus in someone else and pointing Him out to that person. I can think of no better place where this attitude would be useful than Honduras. The people here—even and especially in many cases, church people—are so wounded. Ministries that operate with a condescending attitude of having to teach “those poor ignorant people” or fixing their “backward culture” do so much more harm than good. Individuals who come to “minister” by doing more talking than listening, more teaching than learning, and more giving than receiving often do damage that must later be “cleaned up” by someone else.

In the months that I have been here, God has humbled me greatly and exposed just how weak I truly am. In His amazing love, He has allowed me the rare gift of understanding that He loves me not for what I do for Him but simply because I am His child. He has given me beautiful opportunities to be faithful in the small things and to learn to surrender all of my bigger dreams for the future in prayer to Him. Listening to the struggles of my Danish boys has reminded me of how far God has brought me and how much He has mellowed me out since I moved here. I think one of the biggest reasons I so love the Honduran people is that I have learned and continue to learn so much from them. I have been so blessed and continue to be blessed by their wonderful example of dependency on God, generosity, and perseverance. I have been encouraged and continue to be encouraged by their loving acceptance of me, their patience with my differences, and their interest in who I am.

One last lesson I’ll mention that was brought fully to light while I was in Nicaragua is this: God has given me the freedom to fail. I have known that for a while at least in a logical fashion, but I hadn’t really been living it to its depths because it hadn’t penetrated my heart. But recently, through a series of circumstances, I have come to recognize that there will be times when I will think that God is leading me in a certain direction (I don’t know why I’m so prone to try to figure Him out!), and I am completely wrong. But, if I cling to God and resolve to be obedient to Him above all else, whether I am wrong or not, doesn’t matter because He gives me the freedom to fail. As long as He is the one that is my greatest delight, even if I am totally blind to the direction in which He is taking me, my life isn’t ruined. For a long time, I had this concept that if I sought God, He’d always tell me the direction to go in and keep me from being embarrassed or wrong. But, now, I don’t believe that is always the case. Sometimes, He isn’t going to tell us the direction He is taking us because He wants to see if we’ll blindly put our hand in His and just follow. The result in the end may be that we have to be humbled to see that we were completely wrong, but if He is our greatest heart’s desire, we’ll also find that even though we aren’t going in the direction we thought, we’re still on God’s perfect path that actually leads to something a million times better than what we’d imagined.

This freedom to fail and the acknowledgement of this freedom in the depths of my heart feels like learning another language. To learn another language, one has to be willing to jump in and be wrong, look stupid, and trust that we have the freedom to fail (because we’re only going to learn from our failures anyway). It’s the same with learning the language of the Holy Spirit. I am coming to realize that so often I don’t invite the Holy Spirit into every moment of my life and interactions with others because I am afraid to fail. I’m afraid that if I pray for a person who is sick, they might not get healed…and then I would be wrong. I am afraid that if I share the word that I believe that God is laying on my heart for someone that I could be completely in left field, and they’re going to think I’m nuts. I am afraid to seek out opportunities to develop spiritual fluency because I haven’t really been trusting that God gives me the freedom to fail and that His grace is sufficient even when I am wrong.

Last night, I rewatched the documentary, Finger of God, and I was amazed by everything that God reminded me of through the people sharing their stories. Jesus says in John 14:12-14:
I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, if anyone steadfastly believes in Me, he will himself be able to do the things that I do; and he will do even greater things than these, because I go to the Father. And I will do [I Myself will grant] whatever you ask in My Name [as presenting all that I AM], so that the Father may be glorified and extolled in (through) the Son. [Yes] I will grant [I Myself will do for you] whatever you shall ask in My Name [as presenting all that I AM].

God gives us the freedom to fail as we learn the language of His Holy Spirit, but if we sit back and are afraid to step out, be wrong, or look stupid, as one of the guys from the documentary says, the Holy Spirit will be imprisoned in us unbelieving believers. The life that God has called Christians (followers of Jesus) to is much much more expansive than the lives that average Christians tend to lead. But, I am reaching a place where I want to do the things that Jesus did. I want to do greater things than Jesus did. As Kevin Dedmon said in Finger of God, “If we’re in Christ, all of us have the Holy Spirit. . . . All of us have God communing with us, so there’s no difference in the kingdom between those who go after the supernatural and those who don’t. We all have the same resource. We all have the same access. We’re all sons and daughters. We’re all children, and therefore, we have access and have been given the same authority as His children to release what’s in the Kingdom.”

God created our human brains in such a way that we all have the capacity to learn a second, third, etc. language, but it is a part of the brain that must be deliberately accessed. Those who use that portion and function of their brains are not any more capable or special than those humans who don’t, but they are activating a piece of themselves that opens the world and frees human interaction in more expansive ways. For those who never access that capability of the brain, they are merely living with a hidden world lying dormant at their fingertips or rather in the recesses of their brain’s potential. It is the same with the language of the Holy Spirit and the Kingdom of God. God has given all of us followers that truth that we can and will do greater things than Jesus did, but we have to deliberately access that capacity. We have to willingly decide to run recklessly after God, put Jesus’ word into obedient action, and develop fluency in bringing the Kingdom of God on earth. It isn’t a “talent” for only the most spiritual. It is a gift we’ve all been given. It is a gift that I don’t want to waste any longer.

All my love,

Sarah