As You Go- Encuentros (Encounters)
Before I go to a country, or soon after I arrive in the new country, I ask the Lord for a word for my time there. Soon after we arrived in Guatemala, he gave me the word “Encuentros”, which is the Spanish word for Encounters. He told me that not only would I have encounters with God in this country, but my team would have encounters with Him and we would encounter people and play a part in the Lord encountering the people we met along the way.
Here are some testimonies from 3 individual days on one of our weeks in Guatemala-
Activation Thursdays– (November 3rd, 2022)-
At the Adventures Base in Guatemala the staff hold a day each week to train the racers who are at the base. In the morning, there is worship, a teaching, and then everyone is sent out to put into practice the element that was taught on that morning. One of our first activation Thursdays, the base staff taught on Intimacy with God. After the teaching my team gathered to pray about where we were to go for the afternoon and to take some time to listen to the Lord before we headed out for the day.
“Let’s gather right outside”, I told my team after we had just listened to a message on Intimacy with God from a few of the base staff members. Guatemala is known as the Land of Eternal Spring and even for an early November day, the early afternoon felt like a lovely spring day. We gathered outside in teams to discuss our time in response after hearing the message. After our initial discussion, we spent some time in prayer asking the Lord to speak to us about where He wanted us to go. We had two members from the base staff who joined our team to go out for the afternoon to pray and talk to people. After a few moments of listening to the Lord, one of the base staff asked my team if anyone got anything.
“I saw a picture of a woman making tortillas,” one of my girls said.
“I thought of chickens,” said another.
“I saw a picture of footprints,” I added.
“I heard Texas and a cowboy hat,” someone else said.
Eventually, we decided to head to a village town called Los Aposentos, which was about a 15 minute walk from the base. We start walking and my team is talking, praying, and getting to know the two base members who joined us for the day. One of them mentions that we are getting close to the village. As we enter the main section of the village, one of my girls points to a little store on the right side of the road. We look inside and see three women making tortillas from inside their home. We head over and start talking to them and find out that they are family members. Two sisters and a sister-in-law and all of their families live in the room that is connected to the room where they are selling tortillas. We have our conversation with them as we watch them take balls of the corn maize mixture, shape it into their hands, flatten it around several times and then add it to the flat, circular, griddle they are all standing around. Each of the women take turns flipping the tortillas on the griddle over and over, rotating them around the heat. We hear about their family as they give us tortillas to try. We ask for prayer requests and I point to one of my girls, “Hey, will you pray for this family before we leave and encourage them.” She nods and encourages the family and prays over them and we head around the corner to where half of our team is playing with one of their children. We continue to talk to some members of their family and then I see a little girl and an older boy a little farther down the alley. I walk over to them and start talking to them, finding out their ages and names. After a few minutes, my team comes up and joins me in talking to these two young cousins. The father of the little girl comes out and we start talking to him. We see on his arm that he has a tattoo of two red footprints with his daughters’ name next to the footprints. He explains that all of the houses around him are his family members and he asks us if we want to see his puppies.
“Of course” my team says. He takes us around back and gives us some guava fruit from his tree and takes us to his puppies and as we walk behind his house, there is a pond with ducks and chickens all around. As we got to know this man some more I got to explain what we were doing and that the Lord had shown us pictures that led us to him and that the Lord sees him and loves him very much. He explained that his dad is a pastor of a local church and we also got to pray and encourage as the Lord was encouraging us through confirming what He had been showing us.
We say goodbye and start heading back towards the base as it was getting later in the afternoon. As we are walking back one of the girls yells “A cowboy hat across the road”. We look over and see an older man wearing a black cowboy hat and a young girl selling corn on the side of the road. They hadn’t been there when we first left for Los Aposentos. We cross over to the other side and start talking to this man and his granddaughter. A few of us start talking to the granddaughter who began to show us her lesson that she was working on in school, as the rest of the team talked to the grandfather. After our conversations, they told us that the grandfather has family in Texas and we ended our time with praying for the family. As we walked back home we realized how the Lord had led us each step from seeing the first family of women making tortillas, to chickens, and footprints, and a cowboy hat. The Lord was teaching my team and I how to listen for His voice as he is speaking and how to be led by him “as we go”.
Leadership Call Friday– (November 4th, 2022)
Part of my role as a squad leader for Gap J included having leadership calls every Friday. Twice a month our calls were with our two Mentors in the States and the other two calls a month were with our mentors plus the three couples who make up our coaching team. On this particular day, we were having our “Big Call” with everyone on our 13 member leadership team which meant that our call was earlier in the day. We normally went off base and into Antigua for our calls, to do so we needed to take a chicken bus. A chicken bus is like a yellow school bus that is often painted all kinds of colors. We left the base around 6:30 am to catch a bus into Antigua. This early in the morning many people board the bus from the towns around to take it into Antigua for work. We crossed the street to wait for the bus and soon hear “Antigua!, Antigua!, Antigua!” as a man hangs off the side of the bus and yells to let us know where the bus is headed. We put our hand out to flag the bus down.
As soon as the 5th person gets both feet on the bottom step, the door closes and the bus resumes coarse abruptly. My friend Hannah takes a window seat and I slide into the seat next to her. The seats fit two people, but when crowded often have 3 people in each seat. Pretty soon into our drive the bus is getting really full. I see a woman looking for a seat and move in closer to Hannah to make room for her. She smiles and sits down, “Gracias”, she tells me. After I tell her good morning I begin to settle into our drive. I didn’t particularly want to jump into a conversation since it was early and I had a lot on my mind, but the Lord gives me a nudge and tells me to start a conversation with this woman. I begin to speak with her in Spanish. I ask her what her name is and get to know her a little bit. I feel like the Lord gives me something to share with her so I ask her first, “¿Ud. Conoce a Jesús? [Do you know Jesus]. She pauses and looks at me and smiles with a knowing look. She responds, “Tengo siete hijos” [I have seven children].
This time I pause, I don’t understand her response. Did she not understand me? I wonder to myself. She sees my confusion and clarifies that she does know Jesus, she knows him deeply. As we continue, I find out that she is a single mother of seven children who is so hardworking and so kind. Her desire is to know God more and serve him and it was a really touching conversation for both of us. The Lord used this conversation to encourage me greatly. I had been a little discouraged at this point and in this conversation I got to see a glimpse into the heart of the Father who deeply loves his daughter.
House Visits- (Tuesday, November 8th, 2022)
On Tuesdays, my team had a separate ministry up in the village of Acatenango. Acatenango is a volcano that people hike up to see another volcano, Fuego, erupt. This area around the volcanoes is so beautiful and my teammates and I greatly enjoyed our long drive to get to the village. On our drive up, on this particular day, as I am looking at the scenery, I start talking to the Lord. We continue the dialogue that we began that morning when I woke up. I start talking to him about anything and everything, the dialogue continues throughout my days so I start listening as he begins to speak to me.
“Today’s a good day for someone to get healed”, he tells me.
“Wow, that’s cool Lord” I think to myself and I start to pray that we would see someone get healed during our time in the village.
Once we arrive in the village, we head to the house of these sisters who are our ministry contacts in this village. We start our day by praying and worshiping before splitting into two groups and going out for house visits. The group that I was with started walking around the church that we would later be using to hold an English class that afternoon. We stopped to pray and ask the Lord to direct us to who He wanted us to talk to. We call this “Asking the Lord” or “ATL” for short. We pause as a group and listen to see how He wants to direct. One of my teammates got the picture of a gate that we walked by that had a red house. Another got a verse and I was also reminded of a scripture, Psalms 42. Psalms 42 was a passage that I held on to in a season of grieving the loss of some friends. I got the sense that who I was to share this passage with would also be experiencing some grief or a hard season of some kind.
We head to the gate we had just walked by and call out to the family inside. A young girl opens the gate and beckoned us in. “Pase adelante” the young girl tells us. “Con permiso” we respond in the traditional Guatemalan greeting of entering someone’s home. We get brought into a small room where we meet the mother and the grandmother of the family. Most of the children are grown and are either at work or married, except for the two youngest daughters. We ask them questions about their family and they start sharing aspects of their story. One of the woman’s married daughter’s father-in-law has just passed away and this woman was unable to go comfort her daughter because she was having such bad leg pain. We get to share with her what the Lord had showed us in Scripture about how he is with us in deep pain and we open up to Psalms 18 and Psalms 42 and ask the Lord to bring comfort to the family.
Before we leave, I ask the woman who mentioned her leg pain, “Can we pray for your legs?” She tells us yes and we gather around her and all pray out loud for the pain to leave in Jesus’ name. After everyone stops praying, we ask her, “How do your legs feel?” She tells us that her pain is all gone and we thank Jesus and then continue getting to know her family more. This family was one that we had the privilege of building a relationship with every Tuesday we went to this village and another reminder that God desires to encounter His children “as we go” about the villages, or the grocery store, or the bus. Wherever we go He desires to use us to reach those who do not know about the deep love and forgiveness that he offers to people. In our time in Guatemala, we got to see glimpses of the desire that the Lord has to partner with us and to interrupt our days to pray for, encourage, or share the gospel with someone whom He loves.
During this season in Guatemala, I had been reflecting a lot on the partnership that the Lord invites us into. In Revelations 22:17, it says “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come’. And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.”
The Spirit AND the Bride….
We (The church) are described as the Bride of Christ and we have an active role in saying “come” with the Spirit. The Lord invites us to be used by HIM. He invites us into partnership with Him on a daily basis. Moment by moment, we get to be in this partnership with the Lord. He wants to use us and is not afraid of our failures, insecurities, or fears.
This looks like a daily surrender to His plans and not my own and I am continuing to learn what it looks like to live interruptible always.
Thank you for reading!
For the Glory of the Risen One!
-Elizabeth Kelley
