San Miguel 2018

This year I had the amazing opportunity to travel back to a country that first captured my heart two years ago. I first visited El Salvador in the summer of 2016. It was my second mission trip and I remember being so full of nerves. What if it wasn’t like last year? What if I go and I realize missions isn’t for me? What if... the list went on and on. But once I landed in country, and got to work with the children and the people I began to fall in love. 

One of the girls ran out of the cancer ward and asked
to take a picture with us before going back to her treatment.

One specific story I remember was when I went with a small group from our team to a children's hospital where we ran a program inside their cancer ward. I remember sitting down and talking to this little girl about the butterflies that were on her shirt in my extremely broken Spanish (which she giggled at). Then one of the nurses came up to her and asked her to go somewhere which is when I realized that one of her legs had been amputated and she had to hobble around on crutches. That's when the entire situation became real for me, seeing all these children that needed the love of Jesus so desperately.

On this year's trip I held that memory in my head as we left and I could not contain my excitement. Now this was my fourth missions trip, I have just finished my first year of missions training and I had been itching to get back onto the field. Our first two nights we stayed at the Castle (our training grounds) and practiced all the dances, skits, and clown acts that we would use for our programs.

One of the things that I really learned through this trip, was that no matter how big the language barrier is, we still are able to build lasting conections with the people around us. We saw this most strongly with the church groups that we worked with throughout the trip, which to our surprise consisted mainly of young adults and younger children (around 8 years old to high school aged). It was so rewarding to see that children who had been ministered to by Castillo Del Rey, were finding their place in the church and even better were sharing the gospel with their peers.


God's hand is so evidently working over the country of El Salvador, and through programs like Castillo Del Rey, the only thing I could think of however while we were ministering to these people was the fact that there are people throughout the world that will never even get the chance to have someone come and tell them the Good News. The news that Paul writes in Romans 10:9, "If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." is something that most people don't get the chance to hear. In the western hemisphere the Gospel has been circulated around a lot giving us the impresion that pretty much everybody at least knows who Jesus was. But on the other side of the world in the eastern hemisphere, there are whole countries, who have less than 1% of a Christian population.

We have a responsibility as Christians to be out in the world spreading this message to everyone we, see, it was amazing the things that we saw when we took the time to stop and talk to the people, they listened, and no one really yelled at us, nobody, was there holding a pitchfork. They wanted to hear what we had to say, they might not of agreed with us, but they heard us out and were respectful anyways. So what is holding us back from doing ministry at home, what is holding us back from talking to the clerk at the grocery store, or the barista in our Starbucks? What is holding us back from spreading the love of God everywhere we go. John 15:18 says, "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first." we may come up on different forms of persecution, whether it's simply being teased by coworkers, or being tortured for your faith in another country. The main thing is, is that we have a huge freedom in the United States, the freedom of religion and to worship freely, but how often are you taking advantage of that freedom?