Well, this is it. We’re finally announcing to the world what we’ve been realizing this past year and what God has been preparing us for our whole lives: we are going to be missionaries in Guatemala!
I know, it took us a minute to think about the gravity of it too. It’s exciting and scary all at the same time. As we embark on this journey, we want to include you, friends, family, and anyone else who may be interested. Why? Because we don’t think this is something that should be kept to ourselves. I think too often we look at missionaries as people who go off to foreign lands to convert people and come back occasionally to share their experiences.
We believe that God wants us to do more than this. We feel completely honored and humbled that He has called us to this as our purpose in life. We also feel that it isn’t meant to terminate on us. We aren’t the only ones to benefit from this experience. We believe that us sharing the experience with you is just as important as us going to Guatemala. We want you to see what we see when we go into people’s homes. We want you to feel what we feel when we hear the stories of those we talk to. We want you to hear what we hear when we walk through the busy streets and alleys. We want to help people get involved with helping those who truly need it.
I’m not going to lie, yes we need financial support for all of this to happen. If you feel led to partner with us financially, there are plenty of ways you can do that. On the right column of this blog are some links that will get you started and if for whatever reason that doesn’t work for you, feel free to ask us directly. You can email us at: dylan@servants.org or melissa@servants.org. Our focus, however, isn’t money, it’s relationships.
As you can see by our core values and vision statement (found by navigating to the tabs at the top of this page) we are focused on relationships throughout the community. Relationships between family members, relationships between families, relationships with organizations and businesses throughout the community, and relationships between communities of varied demographics. This includes a relationship between you and them. Certainly, not everyone can take a trip to Guatemala and for many reasons, not everyone has a desire to. We certainly don’t think there is anything wrong with that, since God has called us all to our individual purposes in life. Part of our motivation for this blog is to be able to share these experiences with you. We’ve heard it time and again: you can’t truly love someone until you’ve heard their story. We hope to be posting many stories of many wonderful people on this blog.
In discussing relationships, we believe that the most important relationship of all is our relationship with God. Our purpose isn’t to go down there and start preaching the Gospel, moving in all high and mighty expecting to change the world because of what we know. In fact, it’s quite contrary to that. So, why are we going down there in the first place? To partner with them and help them in the ways they have asked us to. The leg work has already been done by God and our brothers and sisters in the region. When we visited in September, the pastor we talked to mentioned needs that directly matched up with our passions in life: mentoring children, helping abused women and children, instructing leaders on how to preach the gospel. These ministries already in place are uniting the community, helping believers strengthen their relationship with God, and spreading the Gospel of Christ. He asked us to help him with these things, directly. Needless to say, we were stunned by the direct and exact affirmation from God that this is what He wants us to be doing and that we are needed.
We hope you will partner with us through prayer and in following our blog and newsletters. You can subscribe to this blog in the column on the right as well as sign up for our newsletter. We don’t want this to be a one way communication, either. Feel free to contact us with whatever it is that’s on your heart: compliments, concerns, ideas, or anything else you can think of. We don’t want to go down there and “report back”, we want to bring you with us!
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