The Great Adventure

I’m constantly amazed by the great adventure we call life. My life has been an amazing adventure, and not just in the sense of traveling and whatnot–it’s a great adventure no matter where I am.

I believe that that’s the same for all of us. Even though it may look monotonous for some (or spontaneous for others), it’s all a great adventure. The Lord has a high calling on your life, and running from it and toward something that seems more (or less) adventurous is flat out disobedience. He has placed you in many people’s lives that only you can affect the way you do, and someday it will all make sense. He has you strategically placed where you are, but you have to be willing to be there–if not, you’re missing out on a blessing and God’s idea of a holy adventure that results in His glory.

I was just thinking yesterday about how it is when we run from our calling, even under the guise of pursuing the gifts God has given us. For example, the Lord gave my dad a gift to be able to fix airplanes. But if my dad were to go and work on missionary airplanes right now instead of following the calling the Lord has placed on him, my dad would be disobedient. True, someone needs to fix the missionary airplanes of the world, and true, my dad has that gift, but is that my dad’s calling? Is it what the Lord specifically led him to do? No!

Someday we will all understand why my dad has that gift but (at least for now) doesn’t have the calling to fix missionary airplanes. Today it may not make sense, but it does to God, and that’s what matters. Even if it’s just for one particular instance in the future (or even if that instance has already come and gone), my dad has that gift for a reason.

My point in saying this is: God has an amazing adventure for you, and you need not run from it, even if that means you need to stay put. Follow what He has in store for you, and take your eyes off the talents He’s given you and toward His will for the moment (which may or may not involve those talents). He’ll take you grand places, even if you never move a mile.

My family and I are great examples of adventure–we were living comfortable, Christian lives when the Lord wrecked them. We first began to do deliverance and street ministry around Georgia, and then He called us international, where I’ve experienced countless adventures.

In fact, many international adventures were just had since the ninth of this month. The ninth is when my dad and I embarked on an extremely spontaneous trip to Nicaragua–so spontaneous, in fact, that we booked our flights at 11:30 AM and took off at 5:45 PM from the Atlanta airport on the same day.

This trip was a very different trip than our normal trip to Nicaragua. We generally go to a particular city in the mountains of Nicaragua for however long the Lord leads (it’s been anywhere from five days to ten weeks), do street ministry, maybe go to one of their nightly church services there at whichever local church we go with that night, and do occasional trips outside of that city into towns within that department and further abroad.

This trip was a very short trip, starting with us surprising our dear friend Isaac Prather and his two sons in Managua on a Tuesday morning. We then took a Cessna Caravan to Puerto Cabezas on the Caribbean coast, which is where we stayed for a few days. We then trucked up a dirt road to Waspám on the Honduran border, where we stayed the weekend. We returned to Puerto overnight from Sunday to Monday, and then flew out of Puerto to Managua on Monday. Tuesday my mom flew in and we returned to our special city in the mountains for a week.

Just for your amusement (and awe at what the Lord protected us from), I’ve decided to recount some of our adventures.

One of our main adventures (which I’ve now dubbed “our stupid adventure”) resulted from a grave misunderstanding, which caused us kids to think we needed to traverse Waspám (not a safe city) at night by ourselves.

Interlude: Have I yet mentioned that in the first “hotel” we stayed at in Waspám there were condoms left in both our room and our friends’ room? Or that there was plenty of gang and drug activity in daylight, let alone nighttime?

In our defense, we understood our dads were already at the church and that we needed to head on over there ourselves, so we nervously speed-walked the fifteen-minute walk almost the entire way huddled together in a little gringo group. On the way it dawned on us that we might have misunderstood about our dads, and that it could just be their dad and not mine that was already at church. So we quickly walked back to the hotel where both dads were waiting. They were, needless to say, not pleased.

In fact, our Nicaraguan preacher friend said, “You all could’ve gotten yourselves kidnapped, hurt, or even killed. They like to take gringos, especially kids, for ransom. The gangs signal to each other to do very, very bad things to gringos like you, especially when they walk alone in the night. What you did is not okay, and you deserve punishing. I think I will spank you all for what you did.” There is where my recounting of the story shall end.

Our second adventure: This would probably be the trip from Waspám back to Puerto. There were eight of us crammed in a Kia Soul overnight for eight or nine hours. We moved none at all, and sweat was a constant thing. And there was a wee bit of an awkwardness factor, but having lived in Nicaragua, the awkwardness factor was nearly nonexistent in my book. The heat was sweltering during our 45-minute break for our driver to sleep. I couldn’t sleep a peep. Oh, and my friend and I both almost got carsick toward the start of the trip, but were healed miraculously. (This is a really cool story that I won’t tell today)

Oh, speaking of sickness, we all were attacked in some way, shape, or form physically. On top of the little carsickness incident, our friend’s 10-year-old Jehoiada got some strange unidentifiable bug for a day, I nearly passed out a couple times, and we were all suffering from magnesium and potassium deficiencies (due to the overload of sodium we were having in our bottled water), which caused everything from hyperness to excruciating foot cramps.

But I am in no way complaining! These stories are just parts of the adventure that was our lives for a couple weeks.

Also, some of you might realize that there were protests that started not long after we arrived in Matagalpa. These protests reached Matagalpa four days after we got there, and we ended up having to run for the hills from a bad clash of the two sides. There were gunshots, rocks flying, and people walking up with sticks–all less than a Nica-sized block away–so we, needless to say, ran. We had a local family in tow, and two of them have hearts that don’t particularly care for exertion (like mine, though I am getting over it and claiming healing for it). Thirty long, sweaty minutes later, we arrived at our casa, got long drinks of water, and prayed and worshipped together. We are (praise the Lord!) safely back in the States, but it was getting really dangerous for gringos there.

I need to be going (I’m getting quite tired of digital screens), but I plan to write soon. Thank you all so much for your prayers and support 🙂

 

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