It has only been a week and I can already tell that my time in Honduras this next month and a half is going to be a completely unique experience that will most likely never be replicated again in my life. If you read my last blog, you know that my squad is living in tents on the side of a mountain in Honduras. What I haven’t shared…is that we are not alone in our campsite!
Not only is our squad of 42 people living in tents on a small property, but we are also living with roughly 30 Honduran people as well. Our host family, as well as a group of high school students are living and working right alongside us. Some of them go home for the evening but most of them are decked out in tents just like us. The schools in Honduras are still closed and so these students are living and working with us for school credit as they are learning English.
It is such a sweet opportunity to live alongside them. They are insanely hard working, joyful, eager to learn, and many of them are very good at English! Sharing a single bathroom, three showers, and just general life and space with these people is giving us such a great opportunity to know each other. The other sweet part of this setup is that only about half of the teens know the Lord, yet they get to be in a space filled with His presence. I have been praying that the Lord will meet the individuals in this space who don’t know Him yet.
Living is direct community with these sweet Honduran friends has also made me confront my Americanism, my privilege, and my heart posture towards certain things I’m not sure I’ve been challenged on before.
As Americans, myself included, we have a tendency towards rebellion that I am truly not aware of most of the time. We can sometimes see rules as things to be challenged, or sometimes we even have the privilege to view rules as blurred lines. Have you ever viewed that as a privilege, the ability to not see limits as black and white?
For example; we have a rule here that we aren’t allowed to leave the area we are staying at alone, even to go on a walk. Quite understandable, I’m in a foreign country and that makes sense. The rule is that even if we want to go on a walk we need to go in a group of four AND have a Honduran with us. Ok that seems like a little overkill to my quick to challenge American self. Don’t worry, it’s not crazy dangerous on this mountain, there are hardly any people actually, the worst we will encounter is a drunk guy with a machete. Yet the one time that could happen, it could be bad, so the fact that they have given us this limit is a grace.
When we hear a limit like that, our tendency can sometimes be to wonder how to push it. Do we really need four people, how about 3? Does is have to be a Honduran guy, what about one of the guys on our squad? Why is my first instinct to see the limit as something that is restraining me, instead of a direct result of someone loving me? Risk is new to me. Risk where I am from is an abnormality, where risk is their reality and they live in it without complaint.
What if limits are love? What if in every situation, my initial heart posture towards an appropriate limit was gratitude and not resistance?
There are other aspects of life here that have been challenging to my rebellious little American heart, and one of them is food. We get three meals a day, (hallelujah), yet the portions are much smaller than I am used to. I am getting fed quite enough (don’t worry mom), but smaller portions coupled with long physical work days have been a challenge. We have no access to snacks and are usually hitting a wall of hunger and exhaustion before every meal.
Did you notice how complaint heavy that last sentence was? The Hondurans eat the same food as us and I have never once heard one of the complain or dramatically pretend to eat a stick while they are waiting on a meal lol. I can’t say the same for myself or my squad! There is no where in the bible where we are promised three square meals a day plus two snacks and extras waiting in the fridge.
I am eating a lot less food than I’m used to and God is teaching me to be grateful for the limit. There are entire families in these communities, far too many actually, that feed themselves on less than a thousand dollars a year. We get three meals a day and have the audacity to complain that it is not enough. Why is my first reaction not to be overcome with gratitude?
Our culture is so centered around self indulgence that I think we don’t even realize how much we are prey to it or make it an idol. For the most part, I am used to having access to as much food as I want. Y’all if you only knew how many of my conversations on the race have revolved around fast food places that only exist in the States and how much I want them, you would be shocked!
What an absolute privilege to eat three meals a day. What an absolute gift to be really hungry for every meal, that means I worked hard. What an absolute privilege to have a functioning body to work. What an absolute joy that I have breath in my lungs every single day.
What if we focused our thoughts more on what we have than what we don’t?
I realize how this blog sounds, and the last thing I want you to take away from this is that Americans suck and Hondurians are the best. No. Different groups of people have different cultures and discovering those differences is all about taking a look at each other and the heart of the Father and recognizing the ways He has shown up in both.
It is about aligning our lives with the limits of heaven and realizing that sometimes understanding someone else’s reality means taking a closer look at the life you have been living yourself. We aren’t always right, and if you ask, God will little by little show you what it looks like to strip away the concepts, ideas, and idols in your life that are not of Him.
In the same way that I have found myself being resistant to some things here, I know that a lot of people view the limits of the bible with a similar lense. People read the bible and see “rules” and ways that God has laid out vision for our lives as restrictions and a mode of restraining us.
I’ve been there myself, people, but dang my God is not a god of chains. God is a god of adventure, of challenging, and ultimately of freedom. What if the truths in the bible were meant to be held in our hearts not to restrain our lives but to set us free? What if God sets limits of love?
The first example of God setting limits in the Bible is in my mind the scene that happens in the Garden of Eden. God gives Adam an Eve a limit of love, the first limit given, He says:
“And the Lord commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” -Genesis 2:16-17
Jesus gave them a limit that would have led to life. He gave them a limit because He designed them and knows the way their lives ought to work best. The second they chose to break that limit and they ate from the tree their lives went haywire.
Maybe just maybe we were designed to live within limits in freedom.
“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” -Galatians 5:13
