You are a God of timing. A timing that I don’t always understand.

In this first week of ministry here in Nicaragua, so much it seems has already happened.  I feel like for the first time I am beginning to understand both the simplicity and the complexity of who God is.

As I was reading my Bible the other day, God showed me the passage in Isaiah 60: 19-20 that reads, “No longer will you need the sun to shine by day, nor the moon to give its light by night, for the Lord your God will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory. Your sun will never set; your moon will not go down. For the Lord will be your everlasting light. Your days of mourning will come to an end.”

When I first read this passage, I was encouraged and felt rejuvenated. It gave me motivation for what I thought I would be doing here in ministry. But then, God in his timing, revealed something miraculous to me a few nights ago.

My squad and I went to our first church service in a village we had visited in “Chillijapa” called Bethel (Pat-el).  As we all piled out of the truck on Sunday night for our first service with them, we were all anxious to see what service would be like.

As service began, it was a lot of singing and dancing. You could feel the Holy Spirit moving in the hearts of the community there. I didn’t have to understand the language to see how God was stirring in their hearts. As service continued, two little girls from the village that I had met the other day, Heyling and Isela, came and sat with me. We laughed and tried to communicate as best we could with our obvious language barrier. Those two girls showed me more love than I knew possible at the time, since I had met only once before. But they were so persistent and tried so hard to teach me all the Spanish they knew, through pictures, poems, and songs.  

Then suddenly, there was a shift in the presence of the room. One of the several pastors within Bethel’s community came to the stage and began preaching with passion and excitement.  But with no more than five minutes into the sermon, he quickly fell to the ground. Everyone was in shock; people ran to the stage and began fanning him and trying to give him water, thinking that he must have been dehydrated because of the excessive heat. Members of the community carried him out and the whole congregation began to fervently pray for his healing.

About 20 minutes later, we were informed that he had died. The room was instantly full of grieving and pain. People began to come to the front of the room tears falling uncontrollably from their eyes and praising Jesus through their pain. Our squad did all that we could and began to walk up and comfort them with shoulder to lean on or a hug. I brought my two girls with me to the front and let them cry in my arms and kissed their foreheads praying that their healing would come fast.

Once we got home that night I opened my journal and realized that God gave me this passage in Isaiah for the village of Bethel as they go through the mourning process that they would seek God in their pain and that I would depend on God for his timing is perfect, even if we can’t see it.

Because the beautiful thing about all of this is that he left this world praising the Father and awoke in the kingdom of the Father praising Him.