With the help of some new friends here in Gracias, I’ve been learning more about the personalities of the apostles of Jesus.  The apostles were people, too, and they struggled with a lot of the same things you and I struggle with.  We’ll get back to one of them.

First, our new friends here run 61 Isaiah Ministries.  They are Shannon and Kristi Hopkins, and they also teach at the school.  Shannon is the chaplain, and Kristi is Evie’s teacher.  This is an unsolicited and unapologetic plug, so don’t be afraid to check them out at 61isaiah.com and donate and pray.  Most Sunday mornings, we have been going with them to a house-church in a little village about half an hour outside of town, down a “nice” dirt road that crosses four rivers.  You might call them “streams” if you’ve lived here longer than I have, and you might call them “big puddles” if you’re Evie.

61 Isaiah goes to a lot of other villages we haven’t been to, training pastors, raising up churches, encouraging people to pray, building relationships, and bringing the transformative hope of Christ to people who desperately need it (as we all do).  They don’t do it for the recognition or the large turnout.  As I watched Shannon give the message a couple Sunday’s ago, there were about 5 or 6 adults listening, while about twice as many kids listened to a separate message nearby.  As I compared this to the church experience I had been trained to expect, I wondered about the effectiveness of this little gathering.  God made sure I knew that I was missing the point by speaking to me through the message, which was about the apostle Philip.

The message was about the feeding of the five thousand.  Before Jesus fed the five thousand, he asked Philip where they were gonna buy bread to feed all these people.  Philip said it would cost too much money.  He actually said that to Jesus’s face.  I’m thinking he felt a little embarrassed after Jesus fed the entire crowd for free and had leftovers.  I thought I was embarrassed the other night when I almost accidentally ordered a lemonade with milk in Spanish.  The waiter just looked at me and said, “no.”  Turns out a limonada con leche sounds just as gross as a lemonade with milk.  I could explain to you how my thought process got me there, but it would be just as futile as Philip explaining to Jesus his doubts in his power, surrounded by a crowd of satisfied people and baskets of leftovers.  I’m gonna work on my Spanish.  Philip would have been wise to just work on his faith.

Philip thinks he’s smart.  Philip overthinks things.  Philip overanalyzes everything.  Philip values planning and certain outcomes over walking in trust with Jesus.  Philip tells himself that he knows that Jesus can do anything, but he doesn’t actually believe it until he sees it.  Philip lacks faith.

I want to speak specifically to those who have a hard time with faith in Jesus, whether you wrestle with it or even if you don’t buy this whole religion thing at all.

Good news.  Jesus isn’t religion.

If you think that you’re not expressing any faith by choosing not to put your faith in some specific spirituality, you’re wrong.  What you are actually doing is putting faith in yourself above all else.  This is one of the easiest, as well as one of the most misguided things we can do as human beings.

Or, said more sympathetically, if you have a hard time putting your full faith in Jesus every moment, you’re in good company.  There are billions of other people living or dead who have and who did and who are struggling with the same thing.  Now, they’ve probably put in varying degrees of effort with this faith thing, so I’d like to encourage you to keep trying.

If doubt and skepticism have kept you from putting your full faith in Jesus Christ, I can relate.  But man, do I regret it.  I learned the hard way this past year (and continue to learn) how difficult things can be when you try to do it all yourself.  As a husband and father, I should be the one packing up our home in Michigan, finding a renter for the property, budgeting and fundraising, finding a new house in Honduras, and handling all the details in between.  As I look back over how God handled all of that, I realize that my main contribution to all of those processes was worry.  I doubted it would all happen.  I was skeptical that it was going to work out well.

But doubt and skepticism aren’t at all absent in faithful expression.  As a matter of fact, they are a defining and essential part of faith.  They just have to be used properly, not the way we tend to use them.

True faith is doubt.  Doubt in yourself, doubt in your own abilities, doubt in your own knowledge, doubt in your own planning and future-predicting capacity.

True faith is skepticism.  Skepticism about just how much you really know, about just how great you really are, and about just how much you can really accomplish on your own.

But with God, all things are possible.  If you took all that worry you have and turned it into faith, your outlook would be unspeakably transformed.  If you took all your doubt and skepticism about God and put it on yourself, you would realize just how much you need to rely on him for everything, which isn’t at all a defeating notion, but rather an enormously refreshing and eternally liberating one.

And I take issue with the idea that choosing to express faith in the spiritual realm is somehow a “leap” from things that make sense… something that requires ignoring some scientific evidence… something that doesn’t make sense… something that only weird people do.  Indeed, when you put your trust in Jesus, stepping out in faith isn’t some great departure from normality, but rather a return to the very essence of that for which we exist.

So consider yourself free to doubt.  You’re free to doubt your own human ability when you put your faith in the certainty of the eternal power and provision of Jesus Christ.  And you’re not just free to doubt… it’s actually highly encouraged.

God has been teaching me a lot this past month.  Translation: it has been hard.  Now I think I’ve actually done a pretty good job at school, but there has been a lot to adjust to.  Different car, different house, different job, different country, different language.  That gives me a lot with which to be preoccupied… enough that I have been missing some big opportunities.

By preoccupied, I mean focusing on myself.  I have been focusing on wondering why God brought us here and what he has planned for our future.  Are we meant to stay here next year?  Could we be used in this town or a different town in Honduras next year?  When will I have a totally confident handle on my new job?  When can I work on my Spanish so that I can connect with more people?  In dwelling on these worries, I miss the moment.  I think we all have a tendency to do this as human beings.  I did the same thing in Michigan, worrying about our future, and that natural tendency doesn’t change just because you move to a different country… even a place you know God has called you to.

In focusing on myself, I’ve been missing the opportunity to show love to my students.  I worried about being good enough in my new role, and I was overwhelmed by the preparation.  I focused on the material instead of the students.  Through a series of events with some good new friends here, they could see that I was overwhelmed, and they took a Bible class off my hands, taking me from 6 classes to 5.  In the process, with their help, it became clear to me that my biggest responsibility here isn’t to have a perfect command of the material and make sure everyone learns every detail.  While the content is still very important, my number one focus on the job needs to be loving my students.  There are 115 students in those 5 classes, and there are 19 more in that Bible class that I won’t be teaching, but now I have an established relationship with them.  My students don’t need me to make them memorize the periodic table or the Ten Commandments; they need me to help them know that they are loved.

They need to hear me tell them that I love them.  They need me to show them that I love them.  They need to hear me tell them that Jesus loves them.  They need me to show them that Jesus loves them.

So what if God did move us to another town next year?  So what if he did give me time to learn Spanish so I could reach more people here?  What would be the goal?  The goal would be to show those people God’s love.  And right now, there are 134 kids I know well at the school, and they need to see God’s love, too.  Any dream I have for the future can be fulfilled today when I take just a moment to look around.

And this applies to you, too.  Whatever situation you are in, it’s not tomorrow or the next day or next year that matters… it’s today.  How will you make today matter?  How can you bring more of God’s love into today?  How can you let the people around you know that they are loved today?  How can you let them know that they are loved by you and by their heavenly father who is always with them through his holy spirit?  How can you show them that Jesus loves them?

If you let yourself be distracted or overwhelmed by your circumstances, you can’t.  As I was feeling overwhelmed and listening to a chapel message at school one day, I was busy thinking about how I was going to use my time in the next period, which I had free.  Now, another teacher may be gone from time to time for various reasons, so once in a great while, we’ll need to fill in for another class.  So as I’m struggling to follow along with the chapel message being given in Spanish, I get a note handed to me that says: “Mr. Joyce – 8:45 – Español – 11^th Grade.”  Now, I didn’t know much, but I was pretty sure that “Español” was Spanish for “Spanish.”  Sure enough, I filled in for the Spanish teacher the next period.  We had a study hall, and the students were grateful for the time to work, and I got to do a little planning, too.  Sometimes, I think God still just likes to mess with me.

In 2 Corinthians 12:9, Paul describes God’s response to his prayer, and his plan moving forward:

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

And James gives us his practical opinion in James 1:9, one that can help motivate us when we start focusing on the way the world sees us:

Believers in humble circumstances ought to take pride in their high position.

We can’t let the world force us to focus on our perceived failure to measure up to its definition of success.  We must keep an eternal perspective in mind in everything we do.  Contrary thinking and action are often signs of good spirituality.

And being overwhelmed at school is one thing, but there are a few other people here with me, too.  There is so much opportunity and blessing for them that I can’t ignore.  Stephanie has helped with some medical needs of other teachers here already, and she continues to be increasingly indispensable at the clinic, especially as she prepares for the brigades in a couple weeks.  The kids are learning Spanish (probably faster than me), and there is a world-class music instructor at our school from which I’d love for them to take lessons.  I got to enjoy a concert of his, and I’m not an aficionado of classical music, but as soon as it started, I thought, “Oh wow, this isn’t just good, it’s really good.”  My suspicions were confirmed by another teacher watching it with me who herself played violin in an orchestra in Chicago for 35 years.  So yeah, it was good.

And God’s provision is all around.  Our home is wonderful.  The school is an incredible blessing.  The food here is absolutely amazing.  The weather is warm.  We are healthy.  We are alive in God’s creation.  We are learning to invite him more deeply into every moment of our days.  We are here to be loved by God.  We are here to share that love with others… today.

And for a concrete example of provision, my manual coffee grinder broke yesterday.  But every year, the clinic ships a container full of medical supplies here.  And this year, they let us put a couple boxes on it back in July.  I packed an electric coffee grinder.  The container arrived today.  God clearly cares about coffee and wants only the best for me.  Or maybe he knows it’s the only way I could be expected to share his love with others in the morning.  Don’t tell me that God doesn’t care for his children.

So I’m gonna have some coffee, and then be present and loving in the lives of 134 students and 3 other special people.  I’m gonna hold tighter to the Jesus I know so I can better share him with them.  Everything else is secondary.

So I last wrote about how normal things felt here, and how we felt as though we maybe hadn’t accomplished a whole lot yet.  Now, things still feel “normal,” but holy cow, are we busy.

We opened a bank account, moved into a new house very close to the national forest, explored said national forest, traveled to La Union (where there is another Abundant Life school), tried to get to El Salvador (but the road was washed out, so we spent our time in a nearby town instead), had a birthday party for Sam, started teaching or nursing or attending school (depending on which family member you are), got into a Wednesday night Bible study, found a church to attend, and started struggling through conversations in Spanish.  I’m sure there’s more I forgot.  It’s all a blur.  My brain hurts.

And through it all, God is teaching me new things… new things that I thought I already knew.  He is with us, he alone can sustain us, he goes before us, and he is even more precious and important than we can imagine.

He is with us:

I had planned on bringing two laptops to Honduras… the one I had from Broadmoor Motors and then my personal one.  Problem was, my Broadmoor computer crashed and died on my last day of work there in July.  It has since been repaired, and I’ll get it back eventually, but I only ended up bringing my personal one to Honduras.  One night, I was working on schoolwork here when it crashed.  And wouldn’t come back on.  I tried to reboot it a couple times, and it wouldn’t boot.  Being here without a computer wouldn’t make life totally impossible, but pretty close.  So I did the absolute last thing anyone should do in any situation… I prayed.  I prayed for God to fix my computer.  I put my hands on it, and I prayed like a weirdo for God to fix my computer.  And, well… he did.  I hit the power button once more, and it came back on.  Didn’t change anything else… just prayed.  You don’t think God can fix computers?  Well, I’m just saying… mine works now.

He alone can sustain us:

I have felt that the prep for my schoolwork has been a lot.  Not completely impossible, but significantly more time and effort than I had anticipated.  I have 6 different classes and I teach 29 out of 40 periods per week.  My feet hurt from standing.  I have a new appreciation for teachers everywhere… wow.  So as I got into it, I focused on, “Ok, let’s do this.  How am I going to do this?”

See the problem there?

I should have said, “Ok, let’s do this.  God, how would you have your work accomplished through me?”  Because the fact is, I can’t do it.  I can’t do it alone.  I can’t even do it with the much-appreciated support of friends and family and coworkers.  I especially can’t do it when Stephanie leaves for a week to go to Tegucigalpa to help one of our friends who needed wrist surgery after falling from a ladder.  That was this past week… just me and the kids and school.  I would say it’s a miracle that we three made it out alive, because it is.  I suppose it beats having wrist surgery… barely.  The point is that I can only do it with God sustaining me through it.  And when he sustains you, he also gives you peace, and satisfaction, and contentment, and joy.

He goes before us:

When I try to do it on my own and fail, I get frustrated.  When I let God into my efforts and “fail,” I realize the plan must be different than what I had expected.  I had a physics quiz planned for last Friday, and I just needed to make copies of it.  Unfortunately, the power was out all day Thursday for scheduled maintenance.  No problem, I’ll just get copies in town.  Except all the copy places were closed because their power was out, too.  “Welp, I guess it’s time to show up for school and look completely unprepared for the first time… that didn’t take long.”  So while I worried about what other people were going to think of me, I think God was almost laughing at me.  I know he was at least smirking.  The seniors ended up not having a physics period that day, because they used the period to prep for social work that they do with another school in town.  Throughout the year, they go teach English to younger students at a nearby public school.  We couldn’t really have done the quiz anyway.

So even the work that God has called “me” to do needs to have him in it.  I need to invite him into it every day.  I just can’t do it on my own.  None of us can.  And none of us should.  We were created to engage in a defining and daily relationship with Christ.  He’s there to help, but we must invite him to do so every day, moment by moment.

He is unimaginably precious and important:

And finally, I’m catching on to the infinite gravity of this whole Jesus thing.  If we were just here to teach and to give medical care, we would just be doing good works.  And they are great pursuits which I do not want to detract from in any way.  But God has been teaching me that our first priority here is to both experience deeply and share unapologetically the love of our savior Jesus Christ.  The way we do that is through teaching and medical care.  My high school soccer coach Denny Weaver used to tell us after every practice, “Live for Jesus.  It’s all that matters.”  Twenty years later, that’s beginning to sink in.  Now, I try to tell my students that at the end of every week.  I forgot to tell my ninth graders that last Friday, and when I remembered to tell them this week, they called me out on forgetting last week.  I think that’s a good thing.

Sometimes we need a verbal or physical reminder of his presence.  In case you didn’t know, it’s hot here.  Sometimes, the miserable kind of hot where you just don’t want to be in the sun at all.  So as we had a school assembly the other day, and I found myself standing in the sun in long sleeves with a tie on, I didn’t necessarily love being there.  Then, as we prayed, I felt the warmth of the sun on my face, and something was clearly revealed to me.  If we spend too much time focusing on the negative aspects of our circumstances, we’ll miss the goodness and the greatness that God has to offer us through them.  This isn’t some delusionally optimistic line of thinking, but rather a real and transformative spiritual perspective we can choose to live out.  If we choose to dwell on the intense negative heat of our circumstances, we’ll miss the life-giving, joyful warmth they provide through God’s presence in and through them.

I guess I’ve had these lessons as of late because I didn’t really know all these things as well as I had thought.  Growth is one of those things of which the idea sounds so much better than the actual process feels.  We all want to grow, but not too quickly.  We all want to improve, but not if it means having to work hard.  We all want to be better, but not if it means having to change.

Well, we don’t really have to worry about those things if we let God lead the growing, improving, changing.  Yeah, it might stretch us a little bit (or a lot), but it’s not up to us to set the goals and reach them on our own.  Our only responsibility is to listen and learn and be faithful along the way.  As we do, we will learn so much about the beautiful, forgiving, unpredictable, exciting, delightful character of God, through the guidance of his Spirit, and the grace of his son Jesus Christ.

I’ve been quite surprised by just how normal everything feels here.  Maybe because I had built things up unrealistically in my head.  Even though the roads are crazy, driving feels pretty normal.  Going for a jog is equally as difficult for me as it was in the US.  Stephanie still doesn’t listen to all of my brilliant ideas (even though I know she knows I’m always right).  I still have trouble getting up early, and I still get frustrated with my kids.  I still can’t speak Spanish.  Work is still work.  Life is still very much the same.

I mean, the power went out the first time I was taking a shower in Gracias, so I guess that’s different.  And the scenery is incredible… the mountains are breathtaking.  And I sure seem to see a lot more cockroaches and geckos.  Oh, and those grasshoppers I mentioned before, the ones that are huge… they also fly… like birds.  And I ran one over on the road the other day, and I could hear the sound it made.  They would be more accurately described as small animals.

But things are so normal, even familiar.  During the first couple days we were here, Sam said repeatedly, “I think I’ve been here before, have I been here before?”  And I had to explain to him, “No, buddy, you haven’t been here before, but I think I know why you might feel that way.”  So now, either I’m missing a big warning sign for some developmental issue, or there might be something to my theory.  I kind of explained to him that all these places feel familiar because they’re precisely the places God created him (and me) to be in life, and his spirit is acknowledging that.  I’m telling you that kids are in tune with spiritual things, and it’s only societal training that beats that out of us as we age.  Now, maybe you love that or you think it’s hokey.  Both are totally fine.  Let’s move on.

By my own measurement, have we made much progress during all this familiar normal?  Not really.

Now, other people have done a lot for us, so does that count?  Carlos hooked us up with 2 new bulbs and a couple replacement lug nuts for the car (which would have been nearly impossible for me to find in town).  The returning teachers have given us all kinds of help, advice, and supplies.  The Veenstra’s have lent us their home, the quality of which has successfully established unrealistic expectations for every other teacher who has visited.  The school has been incredibly supportive in making sure all our needs are met, and that includes permanent housing.  I think we found the perfect place, but we’re still working on locking it down.

It just doesn’t always feel like I’m personally accomplishing something miraculous every moment.

But it is that very sentiment that God has used to remind me that that’s ok, even potentially better than ok.  Often, it’s part of the plan.  It’s not up to me to establish the goals and measure the progress.  It’s up to him.  I can only be faithful and do what he’s told me to do, while hopefully continuing to listen discerningly as I go.  If things just seem normal, well… that’s fine.

And every once in a while, if we’re just faithful in normal life, remarkable things happen…

Last Thursday night, after driving home in the dark and rain and yelling at my kids and being snippy with my wife, we started the bedtime process.  Luckily, it was time to read to Sam from the Jesus Storybook Bible, and I was like, “Ok, it’s ok to take a breath and slow down and remember the point of it all.”  So I read the story we were on, which just happened to be the last.  After we were done, we had a moment to really talk, and Sam ended up praying to ask Jesus into his heart!!!  I’ve asked him a few times before and he has always said he wasn’t ready, which is totally fine, but this time, he wanted to.  So we prayed, and even a screaming, overly-tired Evie flying into the room didn’t break his concentration.  Now he’s 5, right?  So you can assign whatever value you’d like to this “conversion,” but I think it’s highly significant.  That said, I also accepted Jesus into my heart when I was 5, but it took me until I was 31 to fully embrace surrendering to God’s will and living in faith, something that I currently struggle with and doubtless will continue to for the rest of my life.  Regardless, we will continue to tell our kids the good news until it becomes their own, and Jesus himself said to let the little children go to him (Matthew 19:14), for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as them!

And so it ended up being right there – right in the middle of a “normal” night – that the most significant development of our lives in Honduras happened.

But then, Paul told us about this type of thing in 1 Corinthians 1:28-31:

²⁸ God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, ²⁹ so that no one may boast before him. ³⁰ It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. ³¹ Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”

We have no reason to boast on our own merits.  We all just have our own “normal” lives, whatever those look like.  We just need to be glad we’re along for the ride, and we should try to pay attention occasionally so we don’t miss out on what it is he’s trying to show us.

So if what you are doing in life feels dull, plain, boring, depressing, pointless, frustrating, or otherwise “normal,” I assure you, it’s not.  God is near.  You are his child.  No matter where you are, lean in a little bit, and you will see just how spectacular his joy really is.