Lesson Two
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:49PM ;)
Lesson 2: Relax.
We are here on a mission- we have work to get done. How exciting to be in another country and working in a Methodist Church. It reminds me how awesome it is to be part of the connectional system we share in the Methodist denomination.
Our job this week is to prepare the building for a second floor. But that is not the only project. There are fences to paint, stucco to apply, a sign to repair, a driveway to dig out, and a list of other possible projects if time allows. When we got started we were pretty focused on the tasks in front of us and then we had to step back and take a deep breath and remember that one of important “tasks” we needed to include on our list is -relationships.
There are so many people we are coming into contact with that we need to be sure we take time to understand the culture we are working in and spend some of our time on the relationships in front of us.
The list of possibilities for new relationships is as long as our list of tasks. We have new friends from the US who are part of the team who came to serve. We will be serving together in the name of Christ. There are new friends at the Inglesia de La Restauracion Methodista Unida -people who work at the church and people who come here for refuge. And there are people from the surrounding community who pass by the gate each day as we are working. It is easy to see that we have more similarities then differences. There are children running around (laughing and playing), women fixing lunch in the church kitchen, people working on projects together and people who love Christ worshipping together.
The second lesson I have learned is that the relationships matter- so we will take a cookie and coffee break mid-day and relax for a bit.
“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12: 28-31
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