Learning the Deeper Lessons
When Isabel Miller recently joined our Marketplace Ministries team in Mexico, she already knew Spanish. So, why should she spend time living with a Mexican family when the important tasks of ministry and serving those around her were being left undone? Here are Isabel's reflections on how God went before her to help her learn the deeper lessons of connecting with the people and culture there.
The same God of the Bible, the same God of Paul and Peter, the same God of Atlanta, Georgia and the same God of Viña del Mar, Chile, is here in Ciudad de Mexico. And He is GOOD! Still and always:) One way I felt so, so loved and protected by God was the family I was placed with for my host stay. It was a last minute arrangement, a trusted pastor was able to find a family a week before I was supposed to arrive. It seemed last minute, that is. After a little over a month staying with them, I can confidently say that I saw and lived these words: “The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you, he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”
Can I tell you all a secret? I actually didn’t even want to stay with a host family. I thought, “Since I already speak Spanish, is it really necessary? Can’t I better spend that time starting to put roots down here in the North where I will be living long term?”
But my team insisted they believed it was best. There were deeper lessons to be learned about Mexican life and culture beyond language, AND this church in particular has a special connection with our ministry. A high concentration of our alumni come from their congregation, and my stay there presented an amazing opportunity to jumpstart my integration with the existing community of our ministry. God helped me trust them, even if I still didn’t fully agree according to my own internal cost benefit analysis.
Looking in hindsight, I now see the time with the family, and consequently with Equippers Church, our alumni, and the wider community in Iztapalapa, as such an undeserved, unasked for, abundantly gracious blessing. How wonderful is it that God doesn’t operate on our standards of cost-benefit analysis!?
I am now back in the North, undergoing the process of re-re-adjusting, and re-re-settling– one of the ‘costs’ I had predicted in my mind. But I am actually smiling right now as I write this, because the ‘costs’ have been nothing compared to the blessings! Recently, I’ve had these words of Paul come up in my mind over and over,
“What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.”
I am not there yet, but God is putting the prayer in my heart that He will make those words more and more true for me. And recently, this has been one way He’s taught me again His ways: that I can consider all the “settling in,” and “getting set up” and “starting to build the life I will have long term” that I would have done here in the North as nothing (or as Paul might have said if he lived today, “as literal trash”) in comparison to the absolute richness of relationships in family and friendships, and the invaluable learnings about Mexican life, the Mexican church, and both the deep hurts and needs as well as the wonderful graces and joys of Mexican community that I received from a month of living in the South.