We are ONE body

This is rather random, but I wanted to share one incident of our travels last week that was seemingly insignificant at the time, but has truly stuck with me.....

After our time with the national team working in Caracas, we had one extra day and night in Caracas (we = me, Amanda, Eben, and Elissa - from the Maracaibo team) before we headed out to the island of Curacao (right off the coast of VZ) for our final VISA renewal trip...don't worry, some of those stories are yet to come....Anyway, this story actually begins on the very first day we flew into Venezuela from Atlanta.....

On our entry flight, we were all separated into different seats in various areas of the plane. Eben was fortunate enough to end up sitting next to a missionary couple from New Tribes Missions (really cool missions organization, check em out!). This staff couple chatted with Eben and shared a little of their experiences and such with mission work. They were also kind enough to give him the name and address of a couple who live in Caracas and own a "missionary guest house". At this guest house, any missionary can stay the night, or several if needed, for only $25 (US) a night, with breakfast provided, and the house is only 2 blocks away from the airport, and there is an on-call taxi driver for any hour of the day...This place turned out to be an incredible blessing for us...not only was it cheap, close to the airport, safe, and comfortable, but the people were so encouraging to me.

First of all, we met Jim and his wife (oops forgot her name :S) who were taking care of the house. They are actually not the owners, but are watching it for a few months while the owners are back in the states for health reasons. Jim and his wife and their kids had served in the Amazonas region of Venezuela (pretty much just wild jungle) with a native tribe. While there they had basically constructed a written language for the tribe. Unfortunately before they were able to begin translating the bible into the tribal language, Chavez sent his army in to kick all the missionaries out of the jungle, and burn all of their belongings, and then stationed guards at the tribe with order to shoot any "gringos" that came back there. Needless to say, they ended up at the "missionary guest house" on their way back to the states to try and figure out what to do next....It was so incredible to listen to the stories of these people. I mean really...sometimes I feel like I'm really having a hard time for the God here in Venezuela (ie: parasites, no milk/flour/meat, riots, etc....) but it was amazing to hear all the things that these people had gone through to bring the gospel.....it sure helped give me some perspective!!

Secondly, we got to meet a guy named David. Now, David was from Tennesee and you could tell that from the moment he opened his mouth and tumbling out came a heavy accent, and very chipper tone. David rolled in at about 5:00 AM as we were all sitting in the living room (as to why we were all awake at that time...that story will come with the stories of travel adventures/nightmares at some later date) Anyway, from the moment David entered the room you could sense the Holy Spirit on him. Before he had known us for an hour, he has already launched into a sermon on the power of prayer, and told us all about this new prayer method that he and his church and his missions organization (Genesis something...) were promoting. It was pretty much impossible not to be inspired by the way that he talked and how passionate he was about prayer and serving the Lord. He was in Caracas to do a giant outreach with many churches together down there....only later on did we find out that he was one of the main speakers for the event. We sat and listened and chatted with David for at least 4 or 5 hours (again, travel stories come later...) and in that time I found myself so encouraged by the faith of this man and for his heart for fellow Christians to be called to pray. One more coincidence....David told us that he was only staying at the guest house while he waited for his translator to fly in....well, his translator's taxi pulled up to the house as our haphazard group was finally about to leave, and it turned out to be none other than someone we know from Merida! Ladimiro (the translator) was also the ex-pastor at Nueva Vida (a church we attend), he also owns our apartment, and teaches at English at ULA! What a small world??! We was very surprised to see us, as we were him, getting out of the taxi....but somehow it wasn't weird, just a God thing :)

Finally, we got to meet another missionary couple Terry and his wife (sorry, I guess I'm bad with wife's names!) who were also from the South (Alabama I think) and were also in town for some sort of outreach. I didn't get to speak to them as much, but did get to hear a little about the story of their marriage and their heart for Venezuela in general. Mostly I just enjoyed being present as David and Terry bounced ideas off of each other and shared visions.

It was a blessing for me to be in the presence of older and stronger Christians. That is something we have really been lacking this year, and I didn't realize how much I missed that until very recently. Because my team is only 6 people my age, we really all have about the same amount of life experience and can't really speak into each others' lives the way an older Christian can. As we finally grabbed out luggage and headed for the door to catch our taxi, David, Terry and his wife jumped up and asked to pray for us. I was so blessed by this simple act of 3 complete strangers, that it really made me think. It was so cool for me to think about, and realize that even though we all came from different mission organizations and churches, with different objectives and goals....we all truly serve the same God and we all truly want to see His great commission fulfilled. We are all ONE body. There's no competition, there's no hierarchy of organizations or denominations....we are just Christians, committed to loving the same God, and He is Good!