As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I went down to the Dominican Republic for a week in January.  Though I’ve been down twice before, none of those trips were quite like this last one.  Before I tell you what happened to myself on the trip, I want to give you a brief overview of what we normally do down there.

The organization that we go down with is called Meeting God in Missions.  They are a really great organization run by Jim McDonald, who has gone on over 100 trips to the DR in his lifetime.  Everyone who goes down gets the same kind of t-shirts that say “MGM” on them so we can recognize each other easily.  It helps to give us a team spirit.

MGM has their own large compound in the DR, and that’s where we all stay while we’re down there.  From that place we go out into surrounding villages to minister to the local peoples’ needs, physical and spiritual.  The compound is nice, with a second floor, open-air room that we like to call the “Upper Room”.  In that room, we have our morning devotions, led by Jim McDonald.  Before each of those lessons we would sing a few hymns, and I got the privilege to lead the singing for the week, which was a great experience.

Every day we would get up, and after having devotions, we would eat breakfast in the huge dining hall and leave for a village.  For the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon, we would stay in the village and help out the Dominicans who lived there.  We set up stations for the medical, dental, and optical people to work at, and whoever needed help would go to one of those stations and get taken care of.  Whoever wasn’t at one of those stations was doing one of two things – witnessing or helping with the kids.  I spent most of the time with the kids, though I went with one of the elders of my church on a witnessing expedition once, and that was an interesting experience for me.  Working with the kids involved telling them Bible stories, giving them coloring pages, and basically playing with them for the day.

After we finished at the village, we would go back to the compound, eat dinner, and set out for another village.  At this village, we would drive up to the local church and have a church service with the local people.  It is amazing how different their church services are from ours – they really get into the music, and turn up the speakers so loud that if it had been in the US, most of the people would have left holding their ears.  The services normally lasted a few hours, and then we would pile back into the trucks and go back to the compound to get some sleep for the next day.  This went on day after day, and the schedule didn’t change much unless it was Sunday, when we would go to two churches instead of a village and a church like on weekdays.

Now that you have a basic idea of what went on down there, I want to tell you about what happened to me.  A few days before we left on the plane to go to the DR, my little brother got sick with a fever and headache.  He was sick the whole time until we left, and that wasn’t good since none of us wanted to be sick on the plane/trip.  You can probably guess what happened – that’s right, I got sick.  I was sick for almost the whole week with a high fever and bad headache.  I had to lie down most of the days, and felt so bad that I couldn’t go to most of the villages, which was the main point of the trip.

I struggled with questions of “why would God let this happen to me?” and “could God be trying to tell me something?  If so, what is it?”  I couldn’t see anything in the situation that was at all good, or even anything that God could be teaching me through the experience.  I got frustrated that I had gone on a trip that cost $900 and couldn’t even get out of bed.

Now, after the fact, I can see that God had a plan for my trip and really was trying to teach me something.  I had begun to think that I could do everything without Him, not really taking Him seriously.  I believed in Jesus, read the Bible almost every day, and went to church every week, but I just didn’t really “get it” enough to give my whole life to Christ, and depend on Him fully.  My spiritual life was suffering as a consequence.

The trip really taught me that it is not by my own strength that I live my life, but by God’s strength alone.  He is the one in control, and nothing happens apart from His knowledge.  I was relying on my own strength, and God wanted to show me that He is the one I should look to for my power, not myself.

This not only applies to me, it applies to you too.  If you rely on your own strength, you will be able to do a little bit for a little while, but if you ask God for His strength and power, you can do infinitely more.  What would you rather do: live a life of “just getting by”, or live a unique, adventurous life in which God does great and mighty things through you?

~Ben