Sharing the Good News

In the summer of 2009, I went on my first international missions trip to the Dominican Republic (DR). The trip centered around supporting a local missionary team stationed in a major city in the Dominican Republic. The local team helped run a pediatric medical clinic and ministered to patients both physically and spiritually. I was sixteen and overly confident. Since Spanish is my first language, and I had quite the familiarity with doctors and hospitals from my childhood, I went into the trip thinking about how useful I would be. My focus was how I could use my experiences and skills to be useful. God quickly showed me my focus should have been on sharing Jesus instead of trying to feel important.

I thought my team could rely on my Spanish-speaking skills to help navigate conversations with the local families we met at the clinic. The thing is, I speak Spain Spanish, which is different from the Dominican Spanish they speak in the DR. I was teased about my Spanish accent right away. While I still communicated and translated, in almost every conversation the locals would smile and repeat some word I said that sounded funny to them. That was my first humbling experience.

Then, I thought my experience in hospitals would make me immune to the hurt and pain of seeing children pre/post-surgery, yet I’d be able to relate to them, and that would somehow make me extra effective at ministering to them. I thought since I had gone through it myself, I could remain strong and focused and share hope that in time bodies did heal. In reality, witnessing the physical pain these children felt and seeing the way the parents waited for the doctors was more difficult than I thought it would be. My initial confidence was gone, and I felt overwhelming sadness when I saw how many children needed help. I second-guessed everything I said and did, while trying to process what I saw.
 
At night I prayed and asked God how He could possibly see so much hurt in the world without crumbling. I felt stuck in my sadness. The Holy Spirit reminded me that the focus of this mission needed to be Jesus. God loved these people so much that He sent doctors and missionaries to not only help them physically but care for their spiritual life. I couldn’t fix any child there, but I could share how beyond what the doctors had been able to do in my life, Jesus had healed my soul. My eyes were opened to see past my own nose and look around me with compassion and a desire to share the gospel.

That’s what God does, isn’t it? God opens our eyes to see Him, to see our own sin and need for repentance, to see the people around us with compassion and their need for the gospel. It was with this resolve I stood in a waiting room full of children and translated a puppet show Bible story the team had performed. I remember thinking how much I wanted these kids to feel the same comfort and hope God had given me. Even if I didn’t know what would come of it, that missions trip was the opportunity God had given me to speak to these people. So how could I not speak?
 
As Paul wrote in Romans 10:14, “But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”

Sharing the gospel is what redirected my focus and gave me the strength to focus on the most important part of that trip: sharing the good news that although our sin had separated us from God, Jesus came to earth, died for our sins and rose again, so that we could be with God.
 
During that missions trip, I gained so much more than I could have possibly given. My prayer since then has been that God would give me the same overwhelming desire to talk about Jesus wherever I am. As Peter and John said regarding speaking about Jesus in Acts 4:20, “for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

May God grant us this level of excitement, boldness, and desire to share with others what God has done in our lives and how we have changed because of Jesus.