Years ago, I enjoyed team ministry with a Belizean church. With two dozen women and girls, I slept on the floor of what was once a dance hall. That is, I tried to sleep, watching the mirrored disco ball circle overhead. Music from partiers in the park across the street blasted through our open windows. Thuds pounded on the wooden floor any time someone in the room shifted in their sleep.
The next afternoon, a handful of us struggled to make tuna salad for our hungry team. We had no bowls, but we did have a huge bucket. All dishes and utensils had to be sterilized, but we had no burner to heat water. We poured forty cups of water into a coffee maker and, twenty minutes later, we had a steaming potful. We poured the whole boiling cauldron into the bucket, adding a little bleach for good measure. Finally, we had a clean container for our tuna. The next challenge was to figure out exactly how much tuna would be needed for fifty people, since there was no refrigerator to store any leftovers. Since we only had a tablespoon with which to stir the bucketful, we made our tuna in shallow layers, like laying bricks one atop another. Then there were the challenges of sharing kitchen duty with a family of mice—a large, extended family, like most of the families in Belize.
As for the bathroom, I have no funny stories to share.
I love little ones, so I volunteered for the preschool VBS. I didn’t know that the preschoolers, having not yet gone to school, did not know English. At the end of each morning of teaching in Spanish, my brain felt as sticky as the weather. I was making friends with the girls but struggled to connect with the boys. That changed the day I, who hate to sweat, played soccer (for the first time in my life) with the little boys. It was all of them against me and—wonder of wonders—I scored the first point. The boys roared when I called out in Spanish, “One point for the old gringa! None for the boys!”
When I arrived back in the states, Chuck met me at the airport—with flowers, a new outfit, and hotel reservations so we could enjoy an international festival of Deaf culture. Chuck was understandably crestfallen that my greatest delight seemed to be the flush toilet, but I assured him I was more glad to see him than the gleaming bathroom.
If the bathroom and the sleepless nights were the low points for me, the highlight, aside from seeing God work in and through the Belizean church, was leaning hard on God. I could not lean on my own understanding because I didn’t have any understanding. I had to pray to figure out how to make tuna sandwiches. I had to lean on God before visiting Belizean families. Should I knock on closed doors, or call through open windows? When someone invited me into their home, I had to pray because I didn’t know whether it was rude to accept or rude to refuse. I had to lean hard on God for las palabras for teaching the little ones and the energy for playing soccer. I knew, deep in my weary bones, what is always true but often overlooked: apart from God, I could do nothing.
Paul Miller, author and Executive Director of seeJesus, once taught us that Christians can fall into two errors: some think, “I can do nothing”; others think, “Apart from Christ, I can do.”
Christ points to a better way: “As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).