This past week, my team and another team spent our days on the property of Zion's Gate, attempting to garden the best we knew how. Our first project is landscaping and making the area around us look better. The ground is absolutely full of rocks, and our first task was to dig huge rocks out of the ground and to pick the little rocks out of the soil in an area where we will be planting flowers. If I told you that I had a good attitude about this tedious job, I would be lying. I thought about something Tony said, though, and it made it a little better.
At the end of last week, he told the group a story about how Herman, one of the older boys here, prayed and thanked God for the opportunity to work on God's property. As cheesy as that sounds, it really got my attention and shifted my perspective. This statement by a boy with a past that has been redeemed in God's love made me realize how much this ministry is actually touching hearts, and that alone should be enough for me to WANT to do anything I can to make this place better.
After we dug up the rocks and picked weeds, we filled the holes with dirt. After filling several, though, we learned that we were filling them with dirt from the wrong pile, so we had to dig up what we had just done. This was frustrating for all of us because we were just winging how to re-work a garden, so of course we are going to make lots of mistakes. God is also teaching me a lot about feeling inadequate. I have no clue how to landscape a yard, but then I realized, neither does anyone else. We all have just had to suck up our feelings of inadequacy, dive into whatever we are doing, and take responsibility for our actions. A HUGE lesson.
We finally shoveled a mixture of mulch and dirt into the many holes and completed our tasks for now. Even though we had no idea what we were doing, we made a lot of progress in just a short amount of time. This just required some trust in ourselves and others' decisions. The biggest lesson of all that I have learned in just these past two weeks is trust.
For so long I have reminded myself and others that God has a plan for us; however, as I lay in my hammock beneath the pines of Honduras and looked back over the course of the past few years, I think I actually believe this statement for what seems like the first time. I now see clearly that this is where I am supposed to be at this point in my life, but I never could have envisioned this moment even less than a year ago. The difficulty of this trip has caused my thoughts to go back and forth about whether I am doing the right thing. I continuously try to imagine tomorrow, nine months from now, or five years from now, and I carefully plot how I can make sure what I want to happen, happens. Don't get me wrong, it's good to have goals, but I so often strive to overcome a present obstacle and fail to enjoy the moment I am in. High school especially conditioned me to stress only to have one set of worries replaced by another the next day. God is already teaching me so much about life each day here, and I am so blessed to have this opportunity to just live, be with others, and bask in the greatness of God's creation. Sometimes we need a reminder of just how awesome and mighty he really is. At this point, there is no telling what will happen from here on out in my life. For now, I'm quickly learning to take everything day by day and to not even try to figure out what tomorrow may hold. I am at peace knowing God has a plan.
