MISSIONS | 007

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:29-31 NIV

Love God, Love Others, one of the biggest things I am taking away from my experience serving in Mexico this year is a whole new perspective on love, I am not talking about love in the sense of loving your pet or loving your friends, I am talking about the sense of loving everyone unconditionally. Before going down we were told about how the locals down there were always ready for a conversation, how if we asked them for help, or how they were doing, they would stop whatever they were working on or doing to have a conversation with you because they genuinely just loved everyone. We would be stopped in the street on the way to the worksite just for the locals to say hello.

Another big thing for me was how the Church down there functions, from the fact that everyone would stand and read scripture together, or how at the end of the church service everyone would stick around to shake everyone else hand saying "Dios te bendiga" which means "God bless you". The church down in Mexico is full of similarities to the modern church back home, but has some different traditions that the church here has either stopped doing has never done, it was stated that the Church there was somewhere like 40 years behind the Western Church, and in some ways that was refreshing.

Being somewhere where there's language barrier creates a different way we approach communication, with us knowing minimal Spanish and the locals knowing minimal English is that I think we felt in some ways less ashamed of our faith, I say this because something as simple as saying "God Bless You" while leaving the corner store felt so natural and right in Mexico, but when we come back home our first response while checking out at the grocery store, or picking up our food from the drive-thru, is not the same. It doesn't feel natural, I think for me most of the time I am probably embarrassed. To see both the boldness of the local church down there, as well as how it affected our team and gave us our own boldness in our faith is something that I know I would love to be able to bring even just a small part of back home.

Thanks for keeping up to date!

Take Care,