Created in His Image

The work day is just wrapping up here on Thursday, and LIFTers are going their separate ways to their host families’ houses to eat dinner. Tantalizing smells from the street food waft throughout the buildings, and I can hear the happy chatter of my host family as they prepare an equally delicious smelling dinner for the household. The local church’s bells are periodically rung to commemorate the two-day holiday (Day of the Saints & Day of the Dead) and the lives of their deceased family members.  We passed several groups of people walking through the streets singing as they remember those who passed before them. Mothers and fathers did not go to work today, and children are off of school so that the whole family can go to the cemetery, eat a meal together, and adorn the gravestones out of respect.

Magdalena is a small yet very diverse and complex place, as we are learning in our various experiences in the work sites. For a peek into LIFT’s routine service to the community, today the health care team deloused children’s hair, and the child sponsorship and tutoring teams joined together to play with and love on the kids. Appropriate technology finished installing a smokeless stove in a local home and the special education team visited with two children that they have been regularly working with to find a better way of caring for and teaching them. The veterinary and agriculture team went to a town 45 minutes away to vaccinate cows, horses, and dogs. In one of the homes that they visited, their site leader Meme surprised an elderly disabled woman with a wheelchair. The sports team has been very active and busy playing with various groups of energetic kids in a handful of communities. I think it’s safe to say they burn enough calories for everyone! Microfinance has a unique job in that they grant a small amount of money to financially impoverished families to help them back on their feet, and then counsel them in wisely spending it. They pray with the families and care for them emotionally and spiritually, with the focus on the money always coming second.

My own site has been in women’s social work, where I work with two other LIFT girls, Sabrie and Kara, and our incredibly joyful site leader, Sheny. She has made a program for the local women to learn to craft, sew, mend, and design a variety of bags and clothing. Many of these women come from very dark, abusive and seemingly hopeless family situations with alcoholic husbands and very little self-worth. Sheny has counseled many of them, and in her program gives them both purpose and shares Jesus with them through regular Bible study. It is an absolute privilege to see how she knows and cares for the women in her community, and stops in the street as we walk to work to ask about their family and perhaps pray with them. The amazing things are the transformative stories I have heard in just the four days of being here. Many of the women who attend the program have made their own small side businesses through the skills they have learned, and through Jesus’ redeeming power they and their families have come to know Him and love Him. Alcohol abuse has left some of the families, and relationships are being restored! As with all the sites, Sheny and the women’s social work program could use your prayer, specifically that the broken families are mended, and that these women find purpose and self-worth in their work and in Jesus.

I personally have already been humbled in my site, and am learning more and more the value of human dignity. This is dignity that the Lord gives us as people created in His image, and the world is constantly trying to take it away. The attacks that these women face to their self-worth is a degradation of that God-given dignity, and I have been shown through example the immense importance of not putting myself in a position of superiority, but rather putting myself in a position to learn. For example, I have no idea how to sew, and these women have been perfecting the craft for the better part of the year. I was asked to use a sewing machine, and since I had no idea how to, I asked a woman next to me to teach me how. To me normally, that wouldn’t seem so significant, but this woman’s face lit up, and for five minutes she excitedly showed me how to keep a straight line, how to make sure my string wasn’t getting tangled, and in general just steady my hand. We spoke almost no words, and yet I could tell by her enthusiastic smile and her friends smiling in our direction that this was significant for her to help her American friend.  Afterwards I thanked her and her smile got bigger, and her friends told her she did a good job. I feel like God designed the whole situation to show me that asking for help is giving another person the gifts of teaching, accomplishment and importance.  In giving opportunity for those gifts to be exercised, I can be of use in building up those around me here in Guatemala.

God is working mightily here in this beautiful country, and we LIFTers are being stretched in many new ways, and also having the time of our lives living joyfully in our close community of friends. To God be the glory!

Lauren Kinner   

See photos in the LIFT 40 photo album on Facebook at the LIFT Discipleship Program page:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/liftdiscipleshipprogram/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2100950696583129