GOD'S TIMING

​Recap of the last month and a half in the Dominican Republic.

Before I begin, I want to apologize for my lack of writing. This past month has been a rollercoaster of “Go, go, going” and not necessarily having time to stop and write down my experiences and also the discernment of unplugging from media and electronics for a little bit.

The past five weeks have been transformational. From the last time I wrote, I have had three teams, my birthday, and some crazy adventures!

Starting from the beginning, I had the opportunity to work with a team of 6. Two adults and the rest ranging around my age. These people had and still have my whole heart. Their desire for mission, MOH, and their drive truly inspired me and encouraged me. We spent the week working with a church called Faith Christian Church and serving at an English camp! For the first three days, we had the opportunity to paint the church mint green, orange, and white and do house to house ministry alongside the four men who started this church! One of the men, Denson, was eager to play music, dance, and bring kids and people in to hang out with us! Singing and dancing, “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles with Denson and playing “Church Clap” by KB and Lacrae and seeing one of my team members rap every single word are memories that will bring me joy every time I hear either of those songs! While doing door to door ministry I was so encouraged and proud of my team member, Lauren, who had the opportunity to lead a woman to Christ!! From working with Denson, Dr. E, Anderson, and Joze, these men had a FIRE for the Lord that was so real and cool to see!! After those three days, we served at an English morning summer camp alongside a woman from Alabama who had moved to the DR to start this school! With four different stations of stories, crafts, games, and songs/dancing, OBVIOUSLY I had to do songs and dancing!! Let me tell you, I have never sweat so much dancing and singing to “Every move I make”, “Waka Waka” by Shakira, “The Avocado Song”, the “Macarana”, and “Baby Shark” with kids ranging from 3-17. To say the least, I THRIVED!!!

Within this week, I remember having conversations with each of the four men and them continually extending their gratitude towards MOH! Since they were a fairly new church, we were their first ever partnership! All they wanted was to build a community of non, new, and growing believers and through just bringing kids in to play outside the church, people walking by, and talking and building relationships with their neighbors, they lit up and realized what it took to achieve community! All the credit goes to the Lord, but it was so cool to be a part of His work in the making.

After some tears of sending that team off to the airport, we had the busiest week of the summer with a full campus of about 75+ people! Two other interns and I led a split group of 18 high schoolers (from a large group of 32) from Woodsedge Church from Austin, Texas. For the sake of travels and missing a flight, their time was cut short by a day, but this group of high schoolers brought ENERGY to the DR!! Their readiness, boldness, and music capability was incredible! Throughout this week, we partnered with another organizations called “Hope for DR” having one location with a church in Sosua and another in the mountains near Santiago. First day out in the villages, we were planning to host a kid’s club at Pastor Frank’s church. As flexibility and “island time” is such a thing in the DR, we showed up and neither kids nor pastor Frank was there, but his son Junior who was about the same age as me!! Haha! It was one of those moments of, okay God, what are we going to plan and do about this? So basically, Junior explained how we could just get a group and walk around to tell kids to come! So, us interns were like okay, lets do it, and this team was completely on board for anything! I stayed at the church while the others went out and after about 15 minutes, they came back with about 5 kids. At this point, the leaders were asking what we were going to do and I was like you know what, lets pour into and love the kids that are here and more should show up later! Funny enough, after 30 minutes, we ended up having around 40+ kids show up and it was a PARTY!! What I have experienced from kids club, is that it will always be a disorganized, but organized mess! So, in this tiny church we played musical chairs, hot potato, ring-around-the-rosie, sang worship songs, danced, tag, shared the story of Noah’s ark and anything and everything we could think of to fully love these kids! Their smiles were HUGE and their arms were wide open for anything. One of those God moments, where it reminded me of God’s love for us! Huge smile, loving arms wide open, and patience for His children in a world of craziness! That afternoon, we did SMT (door-to-door ministry) and we visited one house and talked with one of Junior’s friend’s mom for about 2 ½ hours. The Lord was present. The coolest part was that Junior had good enough English that he wanted to translate for us to her. When we got into a spiritual conversation with her, before he would translate, he would stop, listen, and ask us questions so he could also understand what we were preaching. That afternoon, we were able to share the gospel not only to her, but also reiterate it into Juniors heart for him to understand the truth of the simple gospel!

Next day, we drove about an hour and a half to work at Hope for DR’s physical location in the mountains! We helped out on their campus and their new safe house being built for women. As the Dominican Republic is the third greatest human trafficking in the Caribbean, I was able to speak with the founder where she has had the opportunity to go out on the streets and hand out love bags with hygiene products, personal care products and a written note from her saying how much they are loved and her number. After doing this two weekends in a row, she had received multiple messages from women stuck in the business not knowing how to get out. That is where God placed it on her heart to provide and build a place for women to live outside of that, be educated and give assistance to get a job! I was so inspired! I walked inside the concrete base house and on the walls, were bible verses, sayings, and encouragement written on every single wall from past teams who had been there to help as well. As it will be covered and painted over at one point in the future, how cool was it to see the firm foundation with the Lords name written all over it! That is what He calls for us; Matthew 7: 24-27, “Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.”

I was overwhelmed by how much love was poured into this home being built and cannot even imagine what it will be like in the future when it is filled! In the afternoons, we did door to door ministry where instead of a pastor leading us to homes, my translator, Wander, and I were the ones approaching houses! I was so excited, I locked arms with Wander and was like, okay Wander, we got this!! God is at our side, so there’s no need to be afraid of strangers or anything! We had the opportunity to pray over an older woman who was very sick, build a relationship with another grandmother who basically became our own grandmother by the end of the conversation, and finally an older couple with all their grandchildren running around the house. That last house was like none other. When I walked up, I said “Hola!!!” and she walked out with kitchen gloves on. I asked if she had time to talk or was open to have a conversation with us and she simple explained that she was cooking and didn’t have much time, but was open to chatting for a few minutes. Well, a few minutes became 15 minutes outside, and then her inviting us into her home, and to us staying there for another 2 hours! While we were speaking to her, her husband showed up in the middle! They were the cutest little old couple! We asked how they had met and she explained that he had serenaded her with a Spanish love song and won her heart over with that! Of course, I had to ask him to play it! He explained that he hadn’t played for 7 months, but brought out his guitar and handed it to a student on my team to play! (As I said in the beginning, this team was extremely musically talented) My team member, Miles, just started playing and started worshiping in the midst of their home. I looked over and saw the man’s eyes start to fill with water. With him asking if we could continue, we sang another and I would ever so slightly look over to the man holding it in and wiping his face. We handed the guitar back to him, and he took a deep breath and looked at it. He started to explain that him and his brother would play at their house, at church, anywhere together and that was their bond. 7 months ago, he told us his brother was brutally murdered and he hadn’t touched music since because of the fear, the hurting, and the memory of him. In that moment, he began to strum, and looked at his wife and began to sing and play the song he asked to marry her with! Without being able to finish the song, he stopped and ran into his bedroom because he didn’t want us or his grandchildren to see him cry! We sat there in awe and beauty that God had released that fear and brought joy out of him in a celebration of his brother. He walked back out and thoroughly thanked us for the joy of the music the way he saw Jesus. We prayed over him and their grandchildren and we all left with huge smiles on our faces. It was one of those moments where we were not supposed to be there for that long, we weren’t supposed to go into that house, we didn’t know that music was going to be involved, but God knew. He knew that He wanted us to stay longer, He knew they needed that reassurance in Him and that release of sorrow to Him. How cool?!

After that week, us interns went into our last week of leading a team! This last bunch was a group of college students interning with two different companies and their CEO’s! It was cool meeting college students literally doing the same thing as us, just two completely different jobs! Most of them had never been on a mission trip before and it was so cool to sit back and see them thrive. We partnered with Pastor Robinson in Batae (a tiny Haitian village by the trash dump outside of the city of Puerto Plata). This was the first village I felt like I was back in Haiti. Strips of wood and tin pieces making crooked houses, an old strip of concrete with little rooms with a piece of cloth closing off as a “home” for a family, and little naked babies running around! The Lord put this place on my heart and it was prevalent. We had the opportunity to build a house for a woman whose house had burned down recently and also fix their water source! This village had Christian, catholic, and voodoo, and God gave us the opportunity to share the gospel to every person/family/child we met and transform the hearts of so many including the kids on my team and translators! One of the coolest part of this week was two of the team members were able share the gospel drawing the cross/bridge visual representation in the dirt and leading this man to Christ while a voodoo ceremony happening in the home right behind them. Overall, an amazing week of being placed in uncomfortable places and feeling filled by the will of the Lord.

The last ten days of this internship, our staff decided to have an “intern spiritual retreat” to prepare us for going back to the US. Throughout those 10 days, we as interns were able to serve in the communities and villages we had been serving with teams in, sit in three sessions a day with head staff flying in to speak to us coming from the DR, Haiti, and the stateside offices in Austin, Texas, having small group Bible studies each day, and intern nights where we as interns were able to plan an event for everyone! With living in a completely different country, lifestyle, and community, these 10 were a blessing from God to prepare us for this major transition and new season we were going to be stepping into as soon as we stepped off that plane ride home.

I’m not going to lie, leaving the DR was HARD, and writing this journal entry and thank you letters has been EXTREMELY HARD. When I was packing up everything on my last day in Puerto Plata, it felt like I was just picking up a new team from the airport and everything was going to be the same. It was so weird! Living life there went by so fast and I could not believe I was already leaving. Once I went through security, I went and got my first ‘sorta’ American/last DR meal, which was pollo con fritas with REAL HEINZ KETCHUP!! It was so good. One by one, my intern friends were leaving to go to their flights…then it was me. I was fine, I was praying, and I felt good! Once I walked up to the flight table and they scanned my boarding ticket, I started shaking and tearing up. It was happening. The day I was utterly dreading, but exited for. I walked onto the plane, found my seat, got cozy and sat with my stomach in knots and water filling my eyes. I was sitting there saying to myself, “CAYLA, GET IT UNDER CONTROL, YOU KNEW THIS DAY WAS COMING, YOU/RE SITTING NEXT TO TWO GROWN MEN WHO CANT SEE YOU CRY, YOU'RE FINE, ITS OKAY, GODS GOT YOU!!!!” I just couldn’t believe the day God had been preparing me for finally came! Two hours later, I landed safe and sound in Miami! Walking off the plane, my bestie Katie surprised me, then I was contacted with air-conditioning that made me freeze, toilets I was able to flush toilet paper down, and no cockroaches/lizards/ants/tarantulas in my room!! *queue “A Whole New World” from Aladdin* haha! It was kind of like a reverse culture shock of coming back to America! Those next three days of being home were some of the hardest days of just having a turnaround of what my life had been like the past 2 ½ months.

I got to the point that I didn’t want to sit down in His word because it would make me sad that I wasn’t in the DR with my morning cup of coffee and mountain view. I went to church and it wasn’t in Creole, it wasn’t people screaming and dancing during worship, and it wasn’t being squished in a tiny church SWEATING. I wasn’t giving hugs to my favorite cooks Esperanza and Alicia in the mornings and getting their yummy Haitian meals. I wasn’t waking up next to my 18+ intern gals, getting ready in 10 minutes, packing lunches, carrying water jugs to the canter, and I wasn’t going to see pastors. I was just waking up in my bed having no set agenda. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going through the motions, but God has taught me to be thankful.

Thankful for those morning sunrises with my cup of coffee and Bible, those night worship sesh’s praising Him on the mountains arms wide open, for those late night talks with my girls, those random dance parties with my drivers Papo and Alex, those daily piggy back rides and giggles from little kiddos, those “GOOD MORNING CAYLAAAA- big bear hug-“ greetings from my best friend translators, those completely on the edge of exhaustion feeling like I had no energy left, those moments of sad tears or happy tears, those hammock swaying moments singing Jesus songs and mooing to cows, those simple but impactful moments, those cantar rides feeling the wind in my hair and that DR smell, and more and more thankful moments.

Those are moments God placed in my life for a reason! He puts us in different seasons in our lives to grow us and build us up to step into our next season BOLD and STRONG for Him. I can now look back at all the beautiful moments God presented to me and share them with others. Use the leadership skills He built within me and the deeper knowledge of His word to expand His kingdom. My word of the summer was “surrender”. Surrendering my selfish desires, my attitude, my fears, my thoughts, my negativity and leaving it at the cross. Luke 6:23-24 says, “Then He said to them all, if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.” A total submission, a sacrifice, a giving up your time, your social status, a daily devotion to follow Him completely each day. We don’t deserve His love, we don’t deserve salvation, but Jesus died a horrid, bloody death for us to pay for our sins, to wipe us clean so that we may have a personal relationship with God and have an everlasting life with Him. His love is so deep, His presence is so wide, and His heart is so great. How amazing is our God?

This summer was one for the books. Currently sitting on my bed after a week of pre-recruitment in Tallahassee, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for following along on my summer journey (and this really long blog)!!! The Lord worked in me in ways I never could have imagined and I feel truly blessed to have had this experience. I have so many more stories and moments that I would love to share, so please reach out if you want to know more!!!

Stay rad y’all,

Cay