By CBF field personnel Brooke
Our trip did not start as planned. In fact, it was pretty rotten. The roads were rough, the sun was high in the sky and the back of the pickup was crowded as we traveled for hours to get to the villages. We were not beginning in a good mood, and it was only about to get worse.
In 2017, we started to work on a small, underdeveloped island, providing solar panels to churches so they could have light to worship at night, provide after school programs and have a place for community fellowship. This trip was planned much the same way as our other trips, although on a new island. We partner with the solar energy department of a local Christian university and while those students work to assemble the solar panels and lights, the rest of us gather the kids in the village and have a small, one morning-long Vacation Bible School. The kids love it! There are songs, there are skits, there are games, and there are usually snacks. What’s not to love! Not only are the kids enjoying themselves, the moms and aunties in the village are watching. They are watching and learning how to create fun church activities for the kids in their village. Some haven’t seen Bible stories come to life in a play.
Back to my story of the rotten trip. After the first day, Michael came down with a tropical illness and had to stay back. That next morning, the kids and I loaded up and went to the second village of the trip. Everything went smoothly until we packed up and headed to the truck. I was stepping over mud puddles, going from broken two-by-four to broken two-by-four, when my foot came down on a sharp and rusty nail. Although it didn’t bleed too much, I knew I needed to get to a bigger city to get a tetanus shot. So, on the third day as the rest of the group headed out to a new village, my family drove back to the city. We didn’t know much about what happened at that third church and were confident we may never know. Communication is hard and a heavy rain washed out the road to get there a few months later.
But that’s the way a lot of our work is, isn’t it? We may never know the harvest of what we sow. This time was different, though. This time, when we had bad attitudes about the terrain, about the weather, about feeling sick and about tetanus shots, we got to hear of the harvest.
On that third day, when my family was far away from the action going on, God used the students who were with us to be a witness to a high school student. This young man was the adopted son of the pastor of the village. He was stunted from malnutrition and bullied at school. He had decided to stop studying and just resign himself to the life he saw ahead. He didn’t need an education to be a rice farmer. But seeing those university students in his village, seeing them with an education that helped them bring light to the village, seeing them bring joy and hope for the kids, he felt a call to something more. With the light provided that day, he started going to the church to study in the evenings. He worked hard to improve his grades, and he did well! He is now on a larger, more developed island at a Bible school. He has decided to become a pastor. He is part of the harvest that we didn’t know would be there.
Brooke is a CBF field personnel serving in Indonesia with her husband, Mike. Learn more about their ministry here.