To Be of Use

Unbelievably our Nicaragua trip is coming to a close.  As always happens, the first few days of the trip seem long and hard, but once we really get our bearings, the trip passes at light speed.  Our last two days have been a blur. 

Yesterday morning we enjoyed worship with a Baptist church just around the corner from our guest house.  In the afternoon we drove once again into the mountains and were overwhelmed by their beauty.  While there we also reluctantly rode a few Zip lines.  This morning we returned to the job site and renewed our war with the mud and water on the site.  Some of our team members painted, some trenched, some hauled cinder block and the boys spent the morning emptying footing holes filled with water.  None of the work was glamorous but all of it was necessary and appreciated.

Tonight we find ourselves back at the Nehemiah Center in Managua.  We will be up at 4:00 a.m. to begin the journey home.  While all of us are happy at the thought of seeing our families again, all of us are also saddened that our experiences here are now over.  We have met phenomenal people and we have made life memories by the water bucket.  We were introduced to the community of the Nicaragua Christian Academy and we have seen how they are attempting to build and develop a school that seeks to bring honour and glory to God while educating children.  Their vision and passion are both exciting and contagious.  We pray for their ongoing success.

In her beautiful poem To Be of Use, Marge Piercy talks about the importance and goodness of work.  She opens the poem with the passage

        The people I love the best

        jump into work head first

        without dallying in the shallows

        and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

She celebrates the goodness of work and the dependability of those people that we can count on to work without hesitation when the fire needs to be put out or the harvest brought in.  Happily we have met those people here in Nicaragua.  We met people who demonstrated each day the goodness of purposeful work.  We joined them in the task and contributed our sweat to the project.   And as we leave tonight we pray that God will continue to provide vision and strength to the workers of the NCA community.

 

 

 

 

 

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