Change has almost become routine around here lately—what an oxymoron that is. In a time of such transition, there are many people coming alongside AIM, some visiting while others are here to stay. Rotating through, there are so many different kinds of people with different gifts—from teachers to doctors (namely DOCS for Hope members), engineers to pilots, and everything in between. God is bringing together a very diverse group for this “big picture” vision of school and hospital functioning together and sustaining each other. Everyone is trying to find their roll and many are changing rolls. Honestly, it’s exciting and exhausting all at once. To actually be part of something of God and to know that his hand is on it is extraordinary. That’s what it feels like to be in Guatemala working with AIM right now. God is bringing people together who have vowed to be faithful to him and is putting their promise to the test. Day by day, He is piecing this vision together.

But do you know what is hard about this time? It’s that life is up in the air for almost every single person here. No one has the slightest idea what is going to happen or when it is going to happen. No one knows how or when God is going to provide, how or when he is going to reveal himself and his full plan to us. In many ways, we are truly practicing faith without seeing right now.

 “And without faith it is impossible to please him…(Hebrews11:6a).” So while faith is super hard to live out, Hebrews says it is literally impossible to please God apart from it. And that is what we live our lives for—to please our Creator. So faith has to be a natural extension of that.

Last week on the way home from clinic, we stopped the car in the middle of the road to find our once round tire as flat as a pancake. What an interesting time I knew we were in for when I looked at the four of us and decided in my mind that none of us had probably ever changed a tire in our lives. Out came the car manual, which may as well have been written in Morse code—our Spanish automotive repair vocabulary was surprisingly limited. We awkwardly looked for the jack (conveniently called “el gato” in the manual?), found it, and got to work. Half an hour of sweating later the tire was changed and we were on our way. It was not a particularly smooth or graceful process, but we just kind of figured it out as we went and got it done. For me, that’s kind of how faith is. It’s messy. I don’t really know what I’m doing most of the time—I just tell God that everything is His, pray a lot for discernment and wisdom, and use the Bible as a roadmap. It’s usually not graceful; it’s usually challenging and uncomfortable. But God can use the not-so-graceful—He can use anyone that comes to Him with an open heart.  “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” (2 Corinthians 12:9a).  

In the end, we are just here to serve God the best that we can. We are instruments for Him to use, and gladly so. Please pray that our faith and dependence on God would come more and more naturally to us everyday, that it would be as easy as breathing to put complete trust in Him—a time of dependence on God can mean a time of spiritual growth. So glad that we serve a God who is always faithful!

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
    a time to be born, and a time to die;
    a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what its planted;
    a time to kill, and a time to heal;
    a time to break down, and a time to build up..... Ecclesiastes 3:1-3

So much of the time in our Christian walk, we wait. We do what is before us, but it often seems that we just plod along, persevering through circumstances that are difficult or mundane. But always there is a sense that something will change. We find ourselves in a season of change now....big changes. We see God moving in amazing ways, ways that are so much bigger than anything we could ever imagine. If we just look at our immediate circumstances, we become overwhelmed, thinking "ahh, there is no way God..." But when we surrender and do that which is before us, one step at a time, He is always there, leading, guiding, and giving to us that which we need.

I was talking to a gentleman yesterday about just that and I remembered back to our initial trip to Guatemala when we made the decision to come, sold all of our belongings and packed up a bus to drive through Mexico. Every single day of that trip was packed with difficulties and challenges, which were way out of our "comfort zone." But in each of those times He was there to sustain. The very first day that we left our home in Illinois, as we traveled through Oklahoma, it began to snow. We watched car after car slide down on either side of the road and we watched our son Aaron in the rearview mirror in our truck and attached trailer fishtail all over the road. When he radioed up to us and said, "Dad, I can't do this!", Duane looked at me and said, "Leslie, you drive the bus." Never in my life had I driven a bus - much less in the middle of a snow storm! But somehow - by God's grace, we made it to the hotel. When we turned on the news that night, they announced that we had just driven through the worst snowstorm in Oklahoma history.

I have remembered God's faithfulness in that moment so many times in the last few weeks. That is a little how we feel.....driving through circumstances that we have no experience for, with no knowledge of how to do it. But we feel His presence, His hand upon us, so we press on.... knowing that it is only by His grace that we are able to finish each day. Graham Cook says it this way, "there are no longer good days or bad days....just days of grace." May you feel His grace upon you today as you face whatever comes your way!