Even the Stork in the Sky knows her Seasons: Hey Dad, Didn´t you write a shower illustration once?

Well I’m over halfway done with the outreach as a start this sixth week and I’m enjoying this second round in Quito. In comparison we’ve been less busy working with this church and we’ve been using the extra time for team devotionals that I feel have finally given me a chance to reflect on some of the things that God’s been teaching me. One of our team member, Francesca, gave a killer devotional out of 2nd Peter that really spoke to me, and I wanted to share it with you.

2nd Peter 1:3-8
“His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His glory and goodness. Through these he has given us His very precious promises, so that through them you may escape the corruption in the world caused be evil desires.

“For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

What stuck out to me was the order in which the qualities were listed. Just like steps on a latter you have to have the preceding qualities before you can advance further. Before the DTS I felt like I’d made it up the first two rungs of the latter but was stuck on self-control. Without this step I couldn’t ultimately have the kind of “brotherly kindness” or “love” that the Lord wants me to have.

How many Christians do you know that are stuck in this same step?

Like it says in verse 8, we need all of these to keep from being ineffective and unproductive . Here’s a quick side-note/dare for everyone reading: you want to see God work in your life? Then honestly pray that He convicts you of the things in our life He wants you to have more self-control in. Trust me, He will. With nothing short of the grace of God I’ve had self-control on this entire DTS so far; and in my opinion that’s nothing short of a miracle! Now the next step is perseverance and I’m definitely in the thick of it. I’m still making progress with the language and have actually found myself talking up a storm to various people but my big hang up is understanding what people are saying, my brain can’t seem to work fast enough and even though I can make out many of the words I’m missing what trying to be communicated. What a practical test of perseverance… language comprehension.

Okay here’s a funny little story/mini-miracle/lesson I received the other day concerning perseverance. The Church we’re all living in doesn’t have a shower so one of the women in the church (who lives walking distance away) volunteered to let us use hers. Now this shower has the opposite problem that I’ve had with, literally, every single other shower I’ve used in South America: the temperature was extremely too hot and the water pressure too strong. Now I was stoked that I even had a chance to take a shower because I think it had been about four days since my last one (this has been a fairly common theme on this outreach and has subsequently led to me having to “renounce” my long hair, as you can see from the pictures below I’m sporting a short new look courtesy of a 2 dollar Ecuadorian barber shop). I hadn’t spent the last four days lounging around the house playing video games, I’d spent the last four days being physical busy and I was filthy. The kind of dirty that when you scratch underneath your chin in the shower you end up with what sort of looks like grey toothpaste underneath your fingernails. But now that I was finally getting my shower the water was so scalding hot that I couldn’t stay under it for more than a few seconds.

So I turned the cold water knob on as well, trying to find the sweet spot where I could get the warmness that I wanted, but I swear this shower was totally broken because with just the littlest turn of that cold knob and the water went from morning coffee to summer iced tea in about 10 seconds. So I just kind of lived for those 10 seconds or so. I’d turn on the cold knob every time the water got to hot and I had to jump out from underneath it and freeze, naked, on the bathroom tile until the I was able to jump back in for my ten precious seconds before the water became ice cold and I needed to jump out, turning off the cold water on my way, until I could get back in for another 10 seconds until the water got to hot.

This was miserable, because 1: I wasn’t getting to enjoy my first chance at hot water/constant pressure in 4 months and 2: because I wasn’t getting clean. So what did I do? I prayed. Like so many times on the DTS when I’ve been faced with an uncomfortable situation I just brought it to God, “God, I know that you care about me and that you want me to enjoy this shower, so please make this thing work!” Now maybe the thing just started running out of hot water, maybe I’m just crazy, or maybe a little miracle happened, but dang it, right after I finished that prayer I was able to stay underneath that water. It gets even a little weirder though because soon after I finished that prayer the water started to get to hot again but this time instead of reaching for the cold water knob I just prayed again and somehow I was so uncomfortable that I couldn’t stay under the water. I prayed my way through the rest of the shower and came out clean.

Practical application time anybody? When I drying off it totally hit me, isn’t this how so many of us live our Christian lives? You can’t get clean without the hot water but the process isn’t possible without God’s help. Without putting your faith in God you end up with only these 10 second glimpses of how it could be, but even then you’re only lukewarm. You have to persevere in prayer and remember that God is gentle with us, and will get us to the place He wants us to be in His time, but that He’ll never give us more than we can handle. How powerful could my love be if it’s backed up by all the other rungs of the latter? What could we look like if we follow the directions that God’s laid out for us? I received a word in my quiet time two days after this happened.:

Philippians 2:13-15
“For it is God who works in you to will and act according to His good purpose. Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe.”

When we reach the “love level” that it talks about in 2nd Peter then Paul says we’ll “Shine like Stars in the Universe”. I don’t really know what that means but I want to find out. I want to love people the way God’s designed me to not the way the world says I should, and even though is been hard at times God continues to show me that He’s real by revealing to me encouraging words like this that let me know I’m on the right track and by continuing to motivate me to continue the outreach and enjoy it.

This is the sanctuary of the church we´ve been living in.

This church has never received a YWAM team before so our schedule isn´t as full as it has been, but we make time ever day for door-to-door evangelism. I believe how many people have been open to it!