Our church service is on Sunday night, so yesterday morning
my WOW group went to a neighborhood called Colonia Estrella. Our WOW time (“walk on water”) usually
consists of walking around a neighborhood to see if we can meet some families
and help/ serve them in some way and possibly pray with people. Like walking on water, it takes putting all
of your faith in Jesus doing the work and really not taking your eyes off
him. We do it twice a week and it was
super awkward the last time we did it, because I was the only in my group who
really spoke Spanish, and I had to pray for two different groups of
people. Its really difficult to pray in
Spanish because you have to use the subjunctive tense and its just kind of hard
to pray from my heart because I’m thinking so hard about what words to
use. So yesterday I was nervous about it
again but really felt God’s hand and direction in what we ended up doing. We went to a family’s house that the teams
from previous years have a built a relationship with, and they asked somebody
to start preaching. I’m not sure if they
were serious, but one of the guys on our team really has a gift for that so he
spoke on prayer and obstacles in our prayer life, and I translated. It was kind of stressful, because I kind of
felt like I was the one preaching, because I just wanted to convey exactly what
he was saying in a meaningful way, but I really think the Holy Spirit worked
through our time there. Just keep
praying for stuff like that to happen!
I was looking back at my notes from training camp yesterday,
and one of our speakers there was a man named Ron Walborn, who taught us about
discovering our “spiritual instincts,” or figuring out the specific pathways I
usually connect most strongly with God.
I’ll give a quick recap:
Aesthetic Instinct: agenda is majesty; find worship in
beauty and order (look, sound, smell, and ambiance important)
Experiential Instinct: agenda is joy, encountering/ feeling
God’s presence (God is our contemporary, in the here and now)
Activist Instinct: agenda is achievement; in serving God,
you experience Him (social justice)
Contemplative Instinct: agenda is listening; focus is on
interior (prayer as listening as opposed to talking)
Student Instinct: agenda is truth, proper doctrine (knowing
God=studying His word)
Relational Instinct: agenda is love, meeting and
experiencing God as community (solitude feels like solitary confinement; these
people are high-touch)
Naturalist Instinct: agenda is creation, finding God outside
of buildings (and because nature points to God, caring for it)
These were really cool for our group to talk about together,
especially since we still didn’t know each other very well at training
camp. In sharing where we felt our
strengths and weaknesses lay, we were able to understand one another better. I shared that my strongest pathways were
experiential, activist, and relational, but that I felt like naturalist,
student, and aesthetic come in pretty close as secondary pathways. The contemplative instinct, on the other
hand, was still something I really had to make a conscience effort to do. But since I’ve been in Mexico, its been incredible just
letting God show me how fulfilling it is to focus on listening instead of
talking… it turns out the contemplative pathway is my new favorite. In Richard Foster’s book Celebration of
Discipline, he tells us that rushing through scripture reflects our internal
state- the very state which needs to be transformed. So we should have the “ability to be at peace
through the activities of the ay, an ability to rest and take time to enjoy
beauty, an ability to pace ourselves.
With our tendency to define people in terms of what they produce, we
would do well to cultivate ‘holy leisure’.”
I’m learning to do this here- its such a gift to feel like I really do
have the time to pace myself, especially because it was near impossible for me
to do so at Wake.
Keep the messages coming, they’re such an encouragement to
me!
Also, our address in Mexico was wrong- the right one is:
Lauren Henderson
AIM Mexico
1474 West Price Road #596
Brownsville, TX
78520
LOVE YOU! so encouraged by your enthusiasm and growth already… i can’t wait to hear more!
Sorry about that blank comment…if you press enter it posts it 🙁 LAUREN. I SENT YOU A GREAT LETTER!!!! will you get it because i sent it the first day or so you were there??? Im really going to be heartbroken if you don’t get it because there is something special in it. I wanted it to be your first letter! sad.
But im so encouraged by your words and the work youre doing. keep using your Spanish, i know the Lord can work through so much more than you think by you being open and available to being used in that way. i love you a lot and i guess ill send you another letter. 🙁
grace and peace
Hey Lauren…have been reading your blog, but only when you said something about the messages did I notice I could leave on here. Loved reading again about the sermon translation you did. We love you and praying for you every day!
i got to talk to you on the phone this week! it was the highlight of my week! i loved hearing everything. keep me updated on how things are with alejandra (did i spell that right?) love you so much!
bug
I am so glad to hear that you are listening to God and going out of your comfort zone! Keep using your Spanish, God obviously put you on this trip for a reason! I will continue to pray for you and your team!