Hello! Welcome back to Testimony Tuesday!! I realized too late that I had not posted last week. Probably because I was spending time with my new brother, Chadwick Benjamin Wilson. He is sooooo sweet!!
For this week’s testimony, I am writing to you from Guatemala!!! I am here for the next few weeks on my vision trip for when I am able to move here full time next year. So far I am only 3 full days in and the Lord is blowing me away with the things He is doing here. LETS GO, JESUS!!!
I want to share one of my favorite testimonies from this country. This one takes place in January 2021. I was squad-leading a group of 24 young missionaries and we had just arrived in Guatemala, our first country outside of the US. Because this was following the coronavirus pandemic, fundraising had been a little more difficult for some of the participants. We had a rule that they all needed to be at the current deadline to continue in ministry with their teams. I remember this was the first full day of ministry, and I took all the people who needed to work on support raising into town so that they could access wifi and work on gathering supporters. Of course, this was a bummer situation. The day started off with disappointment as my group was not able to participate in scheduled ministry. But I encouraged them as much I could. I knew that God could work through it and they would see Him move.
One of the guys who was there with me that day is named Nick. I had met Nick the summer before and he made a pretty short notice decision to go on mission for nine months. Nick is an evangelist if I’ve ever met one. Well, the day goes by and everyone had worked hard to contact potential partners. It was time for us to be picked up by our driver and be taken back to base. As we were waiting at our pickup stop, God sent us someone to minister to.
A very, very drunk man walked up in front of us. He barely had his eyes open and he was not in the best shape. He motioned for Nick to come closer. When Nick had stepped forward, he motioned again. Nick moved forward more and more until his ear was next to the man’s face.
“¿Qué hora es?” the man whispered in Nick's ear.
“It’s four in the afternoon,” Nick replied. And they started a very small conversation. Coming from a Nicaraguan family, Nick has pretty good Spanish speaking skills and they strike up a conversation. He offers this man a banana to which the man responds by snatching it up, sitting down against the wall beside us, unpeeling this banana, and eating it in like three bites. I am not exaggerating when I say this man inhaled that banana. It was gone so fast.
He finishes chewing, looks up at Nick and I, and says three words.
“Nadie me quiere… Nobody loves me…”
Without missing a beat, Nick tears down the lie.
“That’s not true! I love you. God loves you. We all love you. I love you so much that I just gave you a banana!”
“I don’t deserve it. I ruined my life. I am a bad father. My daughters deserve better than me. I would be better off dead.”
“Huh,” grunts Nick. “You don’t like your life? You want a new life?”
The man just turns and looks up at Nick, kind of shocked but definitely intrigued. We come to find out that this man is named Victor and he lives close by. He spends most of his days drunk and absent from reality. Nick has a collection of Spanish Bibles on him, so he goes and pulls one out. He leads Victor through scripture and shows him the life of Jesus. He shares with Victor how we can find new life in Christ! Throughout all of this, I am praying that the drunkenness would fall off and that he would come into sobriety. Every once and a while, Victor would get a wave of sober understanding and you could see his thoughts on his face. He didn’t believe what he was hearing from these gringos on the side of the road. Nick led him through the gospel and ended with the invitation to leave behind the old and to pick up the new. Victor, through tears, repented and asked for more of the Lord in his life.
At this point, our driver had arrived and we needed to go. Victor was very scared of us leaving and as he hugged us, he begged us not to leave. We promised him that Jesus would never leave his side and all he had to do was read the scriptures and pray. We told him about our friend’s church down the road. Still, he insisted we not leave. After a few seconds of debate, our driver said that we needed to go so that he could pick up another team.
“Ok,” Victor said, “At least come and pray for my family.”
We got the directions to his house, let the whiskey stenched man get in the van with us, and we drove around the corner to his house. When we stopped, Victor threw open the door and bolted. We were literally chasing this man through the street and into this building so we could go pray for his family. When the three of us stormed into his home, his wife was bewildered. Victor told her the whole story as we nodded our heads in agreement. She cried as we prayed a blessing over her family.
“I have prayed for so long,” she cried, ”that God would find my husband.”
We went back to the base that evening with a story of God’s divine appointments. He is always chasing after the one lost sheep. We could have ignored him. We could have left him. We could have played victim to our understanding. But God will have His way, we only need to obey. As you go about the day, ask Him what He wants to do. It does not always look like scheduled ministry.
