It feels a bit surreal that we left Urraco Pueblo and are now sitting with the rest of our squad in a beach town in El Salvador. Multiple times I have looked over at my friend Liz and asked "can you believe we are here?" I truly never thought we would leave.
These two weeks in El Salvador are a time for our squad to come together to "de-brief" our last two months. A chance to air out all the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's a time to rest until we hit the ground running with our next ministry in Nicaragua.
De-briefing is hard. There was a lot that happened throughout the last two months that needed to be unpacked. The things we knew God was working in, things we didn't quite understand, things that made us angry, and the idea that we may never see what comes from the seeds we planted in Honduras.
As we sat around a circle with our leadership day 1 of de-brief, I couldn't help but find myself speechless about how I felt about Urraco. So, I will unpack it for you all right now (lucky you).
The race is hard, but not in the ways I thought it would be. My idea of the hard things would be the tiring ministry we would forge in, the loss of our comforts from home, and figuring out how I would survive as a vegetarian in cultures where they chuck chickens from their backyard.
Turns out, those were actually the easiest parts of the race so far. Ministry days were fun and filling, we figured out bucket showers and pila water real quick, and every where has an ample amount of rice and beans.
The hardest thing seemed to be my own internal conversations with the Lord mixed with learning how to live with 7 perfect stangers.
You don't realize how much you surround yourself with people, things, and environments that cater to the ways of life you find easy to be around. I certainly didn't.
Not that this is entirely a bad thing, but in a world where you can essentially choose the things that shape you- most often we pick the things that will increase our comfortability, but not necessarily our character.
