Conquering Me

I posted this picture a couple of days ago.  How very prophetic it turned out to be!

The last 15 months have been the most difficult months we’ve ever faced on the field.  One reason is what is happening (or NOT happening) out at the Loving InDeed land.  For 15 months my neighbors have had a fence up the middle of my 235 ft. entrance, essentially stopping me from bringing in the machine I need to level the rocky land down below where the ministry center will go.  Not to be deterred, I came up with plan B:  starting with the construction of a boy’s workshop instead which I could temporarily use for the widows until the main building can be built.  That land could be leveled by hand, so I wouldn’t need my driveway to bring in a machine, and we could still use "our half" of the driveway to walk in materials. So we started building.  We got all the walls just up over waist high then stopped because a building of this size needs another horizontal layer of rebar and cement for support before finishing off the adobe walls.  It just so happened that I was leaving for the US when we hit that point, so I gave the men some time off and went home for 2 weeks.  While I was gone, my neighbors changed their fence.  Now they have barbed wired over the entrance to the driveway, over my front door, all alongside my fence and over my big main gate.  Due to a rock wall and drainage ditch, it’d be nearly impossible to bring materials through the remaining door down at the bottom of the property, so work has been stopped for the past several weeks. I did everything in my power to solve this fence issue amicably, and when that failed, I began the process of solving it legally a few months ago.  Unfortunately, that process is a very, very long one filled with red tape and third world senselessness.  In the meantime, I have been agonizing over what to do.  I have begged God many times to give me some direction, promising Him I would obey no matter what He said if only He’d say something...anything!  But all I got was silence. 

On my own, I had come up with three options:  take the fence down myself and get back to work, do nothing on the land and continue to just feed the widows and carry on with the Bible study, or temporarily walk away from Santa Barbara entirely and take some time apart to think and pray more.   Each one of those options has distinct advantages and disadvantages, and I truly did not know which one God wanted.  This past Saturday, I decided to go up the mountain alone for a while and have a serious conversation with Him about it.  To be totally honest, I was getting pretty frustrated with His silence.  So up I went, begging God the whole way to tell me which option would bring Him the most glory…which would be the most Christ-like…which was right for the widows, my workers, and all the others out there who are so carefully watching my reaction to this whole mess.   I was so tired of analyzing it from every possible angle!  This whole situation is so unjust that it’s infuriating.   A wise friend told me the other day that maybe this isn’t my injustice to fight.  In the moment, I scoffed at his suggestion.  Of course it is!  That’s one of the things every Guatemalan missionary I know does--we fight injustice!  And then he said that just maybe this one battle was not mine.  I still disagreed.  As it turns out, he was right.  On the mountain, God told me what to do.   He reminded me that He did not send me to Santa Barbara to fight injustice, or to stand up to bullies and teach them a lesson, or to try to force people to obey the law.  God sent me to Santa Barbara to love.  Sometimes taking a stand IS the most loving thing a person can do, but sometimes it’s better to keep the peace than to be right.  That is INFINITELY easier to say than to do, especially for this hard-headed, type A personality! But God showed me that the most loving thing I can do is to stay in Santa Barbara despite the hardship and to continue to feed the most vulnerable among them and to teach God’s Word to the best of my ability to those who will listen.

Honestly, I was okay with that part of God’s plan.  But then He laid this doozy on me.  He said he wanted me to ask my other neighbor, Checha (a very nice, laid back man), for permission to use his narrow, stinky drainage alleyway where he burns his trash to bring in materials, then cut  my fence to deliver them onto my side.  I was not a fan of the idea for lots of reasons, so I ranted.  “God, this will make me look like a fool!  My neighbors will laugh at me.  They’ll think they’ve won!  Someone has to stand up to them! They’ll assume I’m afraid of them and that I’m weak, and they’ll have some pretty good evidence to back that up.  But I’m NOT afraid of them!  And I don't have to be powerless here.  I could rip up their illegal fence if You'd just let me..."  And on and on I went, giving God all the reasons why I thought His plan stunk.  He listened patiently.  When I was done fuming, He filled my head with scripture:  

          “Fret not yourself because of evildoers.” 

          “My grace is sufficient for you.  My strength is made perfect in your weakness.” 

          “I choose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” 

My arguments were crumbling.  Then He brought to mind what I tell myself when life gets hard here: “I will not offer to God that which cost me nothing.”  (originally spoken by King David)  Slowly my revulsion to His idea was fading, but it sealed the deal when  He said, “Remember a few weeks ago when you were praying and you asked Me to take all the pride out of you?  Well…” 

Case closed. 

So today I had a long talk with Rogelio, my foreman, and told him this story to see if he was in agreement.  It’s not just me who will be humbled in all this, walking through someone else’s trash while being laughed at and cutting a hole in our fence when we have three perfectly good doors.  They’ll mock him too.  In fact, he told me that they already had been.  He went onto the property through the bottom door to harvest some fruit the other day, and the neighbors came out to point and laugh at him.  He just ignored them.  I am constantly reminded what an enormous blessing God gave me in the men who work for me.  I learn from them—not just how to make and lay adobe or how to wield a machete or how to tell the difference between lime trees and orange trees only by their leaves, but how to be a better person and a better follower of Christ.  Rogelio and Francisco, his father, are some of the best men I know.  Tomorrow will be hard for all of us on some level—mostly on our egos—but I finally have peace.  Now the building can continue, and we will get the roof on before rainy season, Lord willing.  In the meantime, the neighbor’s fence is God’s problem to solve. 

Psalm 86:17 “ Show me a sign of your favor, that those who hate me may see and be put to shame because you, Lord, have helped me and comforted me.”

While some of our littler plants have died from a hail storm we had in January and lack of water since, the fruit trees are growing like crazy and starting to flower!  My little mango tree that is barely as tall as my knee is doubled over with the weight of at least a dozen baby mangos the size of my thumb nail.  I have really missed being out here!