Before I say anything else, I want to give my highest praise to Megan and Adam Shaffer. I've been on this kind of trip before, which is a trip I still talk about years later, and this one was even better than that. Megan and Adam deserve our highest thanks not only for getting us there and back safely, but for everything else in between.
I want to also mention Praying Pelicans Ministries, who did a bang up job in every way. Every local arrangement went without a hitch, with the possible exception of scheduling a picnic in a spot with no trees.
I also want to thank all of you. It was your financial support, your prayer support, your spiritual support which made this mission possible. You were with us every step of the way. Sixteen people were the face of the mission, but all of All Saints was the body.
As I go along, I will introduce some people to you that you don't know, but who are important for our story. First, Pastor Floyd. He was our local contact and spent the week with us. He's retired from the Belizean military, where he was a warrant officer. After his service, he started a church in a village near the largest city in Belize, which is Belize City, population about 70,000.
Ruppert was our bus driver. Let me tell you about Ruppert. I didn't hear him say this himself, but I think it was Adam who was saying that, at one time, Ruppert had been a professional boxer, and now, as a hobby, likes to go hunting, in the jungle, at night. As Adam pointed out, this jungle has jaguars, panthers, tigers, tapirs, untold number of snakes, and who knows what else. You hunt in the jungle at night?
He has a point though. In the day time, you can't see these animals either. At least at night, you can shine your flashlight and see their eyes and tell what kind of animal they are. He says it's actually safer to hunt at night.
As it turned out, I was honored to do a small favor for Ruppert. His air mattress had sprung a leak, and, since I didn't want to lug mine back to Colorado, he wound up getting--easily worth it for being able to say that I know a guy in Belize who, for fun, hunts in the jungle at night.
The next thing it's important for you to know about is the sweltering, oppressive heat. All things must be considered in this light. The day we left, with a grim look on his face, Bruce Alison showed me the upcoming weather report for Belize which was a heat index of 110 every day we were there. I started sweating the second I stepped off the plane, and didn't stop until I got back on.
We of the male gender slept on the floor of the little church. Ziggy slept on one side of me, and Travis slept on the other. Travis thrashed around a lot so he also slept on the floor some of the time. None of us slept much.
The third night we were there, Ziggy turns to me and says, "You know, in all my travels, this one is physically the most difficult, just because of the heat and humidity." I'm thinking, "Here's a guy who's been to Zambia twice, and a bunch of other challenging places, and he thinks this is the most difficult?" This gives a person pause.
When I spoke of the heat to Pastor Floyd, he said, "Yes, it is hot." Which could be taken in two ways. One way is that it's so hot even the locals think it's hot. The other way to take it is: "Where did you think you were? Canada?"
As soon as I got home, I couldn't shut up, telling Julee one story after another. At one point, when she looked behind me and said there was a "huge spider" on the wall, I turned around to see a microscopic little spot and started to laugh. You call that a spider? Let me tell you about the tarantula that lived just off our front porch.
Another observation I was telling her about was that, although at the time, everything seemed to flow quite naturally, and with no intense anxiety, looking back on it, it was quite the adventure. We went to one of the most remote places in the world, in a country most people have never heard of and couldn't find on a map, to a remote corner of that country, to a little village surrounded by jungle and water.
In fact, later in the week, I had to give Pastor Floyd and Ruppert a hard time about our bus ride to this village. We had driven about two hours into the jungle, first on a highway, then on a rock road. It had been dark for awhile, and we had made a turn or two.
It was about then that we stopped in a village, and Floyd and ruppert got out to ask two young boys where Sarteneja was. I'm thinking, "Oh great. The two locals don't know where we are." Ruppert smiled when I said this, but said nothing. Pastor Floyd, in his King's English, says, "Yes, it is true."
Incidentally, it seemed to me, and Pastor Floyd confirmed, that Belize as a whole is more Caribbean than Central American in flavor. We, however, were going to a Maya village in the north. These are the native Americans of Belize, descendents of the great Maya culture of central America.
Sartenejah is a lovely village in a lovely spot, with a population of maybe two or three thousand. An old sign hanging along the water said, "Sartenejah, our jewell," and you can see why they say it.
There are a number of small churches there, one Roman Catholic and several pentecostal/evangelical-type churches--not too many Lutherans, in other words.
The town has a nurse and a midwife, paid for by the government. All other medical care goes to Corazol, which is about an hour away and which can treat everything except the most serious cases. Those are taken to Belize City.
The local people were hospitable and generous in many ways. Just to mention two of several possible examples, two families had moved out of their homes for the week so that the women in our group could stay in them. A lady in the village spent long days making our meals.
We ate what the locals eat--simple, nutritious fare, with smaller portions. I give especially high marks to the red snapper, which was absolutely delicious, although I don't think I'll look at refried beans in quite the same way ever again.
Our days were pretty intense. We did home visits, some construction projects, some teaching in the school, some athletics. The construction projects, please understand, involved breaking rocks, digging holes in the swamp, making concrete from scratch, and pouring it, all with a heat index of 110. I'd be all gung-ho for about twenty minutes, then have to sit in the shade for twenty minutes. When I mentioned this to Darlene Locke, she said, "It was twelve minutes. I watched."
We also did some vacation bible school at the Nazarene school. We started off the day with all the children out front of the school. The teacher said, "Good morning students," and the students all said, "Good morning teacher." I liked that because I think teachers should get more respect, and, in Sartenejah, they do. Then the children sang the Belizean national anthem as they raised the flag of their country.
I should mention also that there was another group with us sharing the same experience. There were seven Southern Baptists with us, and they were from Pine Ridge Baptist Church in Bell, Florida. Some of our group took the older children, and the Baptists took the younger ones.
I don't know what the Baptists did, but I must say that our lessons were excellent, well-prepared, with good content, presented in a way that the children could understand and have some fun doing it. Plus, I appreciated the deft way Megan handled the class delinquent and wound up getting him on her side.
We also worked in some fun and interesting things. We went swimming in the ocean. Another day we went out to the earliest Mayan ruin, which dates from 200 BC. I have been to many archaeological ruins in both North and South America and this one is a thousand years older than any I had visited before.
When we weren't at work, we were usually in church. We had some kind of service nearly every day and twice on Sunday. I preached at the Sunday service, and our kids led the Sunday evening service, but, other than that, most of the worship planning and preaching was done by the Baptist team.
Most every service consisted of lots of songs, most of which I didn't know. As we were walking into once service, someone asked what we were doing in worship that night, and Ziggy drily remarked, "I'll bet we sing some songs."
The next day at lunch, I volunteered to ask the blessing and chose to sing the "Holy, Holy, Holy" from our communion liturgy, and asked those who knew it to join in. It was lovely, by the way. Later, I mentioned to Megan that I did it that way because it seemed to me that we ought to be able to sing at least one of our songs, even if we have to kind of shoe-horn it in.
I had to admit that some of the tunes of their songs were kind of catchy. I didn't care much for the theology, though, so whenever I caught myself humming a certain song, I'd stop and make myself switch to "Holy, Holy, Holy."
The service would be topped off by a message from a Baptist seminary student who happened to be the Pine Ridge senior pastor's son. He is a fine young man, and I enjoyed our conversations. I did not, I must admit, particularly enjoy his sermons.
Some time later, I mentioned to Megan that it kind of sounded like none of the Christian people in this village had ever heard the gospel until these folks showed up, which wouldn't have been so bad if they'd gotten the gospel right.
In fact, as I was listening, I had taken off my glasses and was holding them in my hand. At one particularly annoying point, I was unconsciously putting so much pressure on my glasses that I popped off the nose piece.
The rest of the night I laid on my air mattress thinking about all the ways I'd like to combat that kind of theology, all the snappy comebacks I'd like to toss out, all the sarcastic one-liners I'd like to zing. You know how it is when you're laying in bed at night and can't get something out of your head. You tend to run amok.
When I looked at it later, in the never-cool light of day, I began to see it some differently. Sure, their theology wasn't so hot, but these people worked as hard as we did, and they love the Lord Jesus just as much as we do. The Methodists say that "service unites, doctrine divides." They're right about that.
At our last meeting, I told our Baptist brothers and sisters that, if they should ever happen to be in Colorado, we would be delighted and honored to have them at our church, and they said the same back to us. They're never going to agree with us, and we're never going to agree with them, but, as long as we focus on that, we're not going to be doing what we're supposed to be doing, which is helping God's people in need.
I kept thinking of a conversation I had with a remarkable man. He's the supervisor of five Life Ministries churches in Belize. He visited us one day. I found him to be gentle, gracious, soft-spoken, articulate, and wise. He used to be associated with the Mennonite church, of which, to my surprise, there are several in Belize. I gathered that he and they had had some kind of falling out. He refused to be critical, however, and he said simply, "You do not build up one ministry by trying to tear down another."
Plus, the young seminarian inspired some good conversations. Some of the kids came up to me, rather alarmed, and asked, "Do we believe that?" to which I said, "We'll straighten it out when we get home. Just keep on doing what you're doing."
And may I say that they did that and then some. Every single one of them was absolutely stellar in every possible way. This whole week, I've been bursting with pride over our young people and also our adults.
If I get choked up when talking about, as I did when writing it, the only thing bad about that is that I might not be able to finish this sermon, and, dang it, the ending is pretty good. But I re-learned something this week, and Bruce Alison taught me, which is that truly big men have big hearts.
I should mention that we had lots and lots of fun too--lots of laughs, lots of jokes, lots of funny stuff--like when the kids were fishing off the dock the last night we were there and Kyla caught a fish, then Jessica caught a fish, then Jennifer caught her big fish--looked like about a four-pounder. Somebody asked Manuel, a local fisherman, just what kind of fish this was. When he said "Jack-fish," Megan Sandhagen said, just barely loud enough to hear, "Lame name, big fish."
If I had to sum it all up in a few words, which I could never do, but if I had to, I would say the trip taught us once again a very old Christian teaching, which is that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Whenever I think of that, I always think of Will Willimon who once said that Christians are always the most surprised when they find out that what they say they believe is really true.
Yes, it truly is more blessed to give than to receive. We know that already, but sometimes you have to be reminded of what you already know. We did a lot for the wonderful people of Sarteneja, but I'll bet everyone on the trip would say they did more for us.
We learned, yet again, that true life has almost nothing to do with money. Yes, you need some money because poverty is a terrible thing. You absolutely need enough money to survive, but money doesn't buy graciousness or hospitality or generosity or wisdom. We learned, yet again, that the Christian faith is not about who has the flashiest sign or the niftiest website. The Christian faith is about love and faith and hope.
The people of Sarteneja learned something too. They learned that people from the big, powerful country to the north came all the way to their little village for no other reason except that Christ the Lord led them there. Pastor Floyd said the village would talking about this visit for years. Of course, we will be too.
For our part, we learned, yet again, that God doesn't care all that much about being big and powerful. All people are his children. We learned, yet again, what we already knew all along, that "Jesus loves the little children...Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world."
And one more thing. Our first morning in Sarteneja, we were awakened by the singing of birds. It sounded like a massive symphony orchestra with every instrument in play. I wondered: Is there a more beautiful, more joyous, more wonderful sound in nature than these thousands of birds breaking into song? Granted, they did it a little earlier than I would have liked, but it was splendid all the same.
Here's an odd thing, though. I didn't hear any singing the morning we left. I like to think that, on that first morning, they were singing because they were glad we were there. On our last morning, I like to think they didn't sing because they were sad to see us leave.
We were sad too--anxious to be home sleeping in our home-deep beds, yes, anxious for cool Colorado breezes, yes, anxious to be back in our country, which we love, yes, but sad to leave Sarteneja, which we had come to love.
This is another lesson that we knew all along, but experienced yet again in a real and powerful way. Love does not limit itself. Love always reaches out. That's how it gets bigger. For these, and many, many, many other blessings, we praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Amazing trip, excellent sermon. Thanks!
Posted by: DKSampson | June 28, 2010 at 05:17 PM
Thanks back!
Posted by: John Petty | June 28, 2010 at 09:53 PM