redeeming darkness | seven updates from ministry in guatemala.

It blows my mind that I have only been on the World Race for seven days.

We are slowly, but surely getting adjusted to life in Guatemala. We know our way our way around town, how to flag down a tuc-tuc car, and convert USD to Quetzales pretty darn quick. I’m taking every chance I get to practice my Spanish and our team and Squad have had some wonderful bonding time as we live all together here in Quiche.

So, seven days into the Race, here are seven updates:

1. For anyone who doesn’t know, I have an intense fear of hospitals. Of needles. Of blood. Of sick people. Of medical-related-anything. Oddly enough, along with that, (you’re probably going to laugh at me) comes a legitimate hesitation of anything related to giving birth, and the general concept of pregnancy. (I’m not kidding.) These sorts of matters raise my blood pressure, make me extremely uncomfortable, and sometimes, cause me to pass out.

So when I found out our ministry contact was connected with a Guatemalan government hospital, my stomach dropped. But there were several other places for teams to be placed in ministry: schools, orphanages, senior centers, so I held onto the hope that I would just be around the hospital, but not in it.

2. Of eight teams here, we found out our team got assigned to do ministry IN the hospital. Cue me internally freaking out. The first day walking down the hallway I just prayed over and over again Jesus, keep me on my feet.

Guess where the women on our team got assigned to?

The infant care unit. And the malnutrition clinic with new moms and their babies.

Laugh out loud, God. This couldn’t start out any further away from my comfort zone. But my teammates were so supportive, and as we like to say on the Race, I was willing to “press into” whatever the Lord had for me.

3. After one day of going in the hospital to do ministry, I came home and cried.

Not because of my discomfort, surprisingly, I started to feel more and more at ease in the ward, but when we left the hospital that first day a sense of deep heaviness came with us. The hospital, first of all, is chaotic. There was a dog just casually jaunting through the hallway, for instance. But the things we saw were dark and heavy: premie babies barely three pounds with deep gray skin, single, young, mom’s with hopeless eyes, abandoned children brought to the hospital by the police because they have know where else to take them. In a nutshell, we felt our hearts breaking, and it hurt.

4. Day two in the hospital there was light. The Lord began to open doors. We can’t heal the babies or change the circumstances of the mom’s lives, but we decided we could pray. We prayed with a 17-year-old mom, Caty, holding her hands and placing ours over her baby boy’s incubator, and Caty began to cry. We got to sit there with her and hear her story. Her baby’s father left them, her family rejected her when she found out she was pregnant, and now, she said she questioned if God was even real because her baby was suffering so much.

On day one, her baby was crying. Sally, our host, said, “Girls, do you see the problem here?” Caty, the mom, didn’t even respond to the child. They hadn’t bonded. She was detached and you could see the distance in her eyes.

5. But then good news started to come. The next day Caty told us that for the first time in two weeks, her son’s blood results came back positive. It’s common for the women here to not name the child for up to ten days or more because of the uncertainty if the baby will live, but when we came back from this weekend today, Caty and her son were doing so well they were moved out of the incubator and into another recovery room. She told us today she might name the child Fransisco. We could see a world of difference between Caty and her child today: she was swaddling him, holding him, and she told us that she is excited now about the baby and his life. She said she believes God answered her prayers to heal him.

6. Today we brought a Spanish-English Bible to the hospital. I was reading Juan (John) chapter 3 with Caty, when she said to me that she wanted to receive the Holy Spirit. This was a moment between Caty and the Lord, and I take no credit for any of it, but I got to sit there with her in it and pray with her. I have difficulty understanding Spanish, but I know she said in her prayer thank you, God for sending me these friends. I don’t think Caty can read, but she is familiar with the Bible and the stories in it. She spends her time at the hospital caring for the child all day long, and I’m hopeful for the rest of our time here in Guatemala that I’ll be able to sit with her and pass time together reading and sharing stories from the Bible.

7. Lastly, a prayer request. We are working with a 10-year-old girl named Anita in the pediatric ward. She has a cerebral disability, is Autistic, abandoned, has gone blind and is losing her teeth to malnutrition. She’s been recuperating in the hospital for the last three months. Taylor and Sarah have figured out ways to make her laugh, a deep belly laugh, tickling her and dropping her blanket on her, and making funny noises. Sometimes the other nurses stop and watch, as if they’ve never heard the child laugh before.

The place Anita is likely to be sent once she’s released from the hospital is no good. A state home for disabled children where she would be fed, given medicine and kept in a crib in a dark room. We know of an American, Christian orphanage called Eagle’s Nest in Guatemala and want desperately for Anita to be taken there instead. There’s an entire legal system to get through however, and logistically, it could be a stretch. The easy route is definitely the state home. Please pray with us that “Bonita Anita” can be in a place where she will feel loved and cherished.

We know the Lord loves that little girl even more than we do. His heart breaks at her brokeness. But we know in Jesus, “the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor,” (Matthew 11:5). Jesus is at work making things right again. He wants to wipe away the dirt and the shame and the hurt of this world. This is the hope we have to carry into that hospital.

It’s a hope for you. It’s a hope for me. It’s a hope for Anita.

This world is dark. That hospital is dark. But there is a promise in Christ, who redeems the darkness and makes it light.

Until next time,

K