My journey begins with my home church, Christ Community Church. CCC has a rich heritage focused strongly on missions. I have been blessed with the opportunity to travel on many short term mission trips, to various parts of the world. Yet the trip that touched my heart the most occurred in 2010 to a little country located in Central America, Guatemala. Here is how my journey to Guatemala began...
January 2010 found me in my last semester of college at Carroll University months away from having a degree in Biology and no hope of finding a job. After sending in numerous applications and resumes to various ecological employees, and hearing no response I was feeling hopeless. God used that to break me and help me realize that without total submission to His will for my life I was going nowhere.
That is when the opportunity to join my church on a short term trip to Guatemala appeared. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God wanted me on that trip. So I signed up, payed my application fee and started writing support letters. Three weeks before the trip was scheduled to take place I graduated from Carroll and in turn was forced off my parents insurance. So There I was getting ready to leave the country with nothing but excitement and no insurance. BUT... God is bigger then all the meaningless problems humans tend to get so caught up in. The night before we were supposed to leave a volcano erupted in Guatemala covering the city with a layer of ash, closing roads and airports. While we tried to make other plans to get to Guatemala, (via El Salvador) God showed us that only in His timing were we going to accomplish His will. Days after the volcano erupted the country was hit with a tropical storm. We had no choice but to post-pone our trip (mostly due to the fact that the airport had canceled our flight). While all this was going on I got hired on full time (with health benefits) at a local retail store where I had been working part time for the better part of 4 years. The health benefits were for full time employees and you had to be working there for a 30 day "trial" period before the benefits could kick in.
Well the storms finally ceased and the roads and airports started opening back up so we rescheduled our flight. We rescheduled it for the week of July 4th. The busiest week of the year at work. I knew that it would be only by the power of God that I would be able to take that week off. Monday morning I went to talk to my boss, feeling antsy and nervous the whole morning. Yet God went before me and before I could even finish my practiced speech my boss was telling me that I could have whatever time I needed off for this trip. But wait it gets better. The day before we left for Guatemala was the day my health insurance kicked in! God's timing is perfect. We may question it, and try to box it in to our understanding, but why limit God's power to the pathetic level of our comprehension.
Finally after months of planning and rescheduling the team and I made it to Guatemala. I knew the first day we were there that God's will for me in Guatemala was not going to be completed in 1 week. Although that week was fantastic, we bonded with the Guatemalans and helped out where we could it still wasn't enough. A month after we returned to the States I knew that I needed to go back. And that is just the beginning of the journey.
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