Guatemala Campaign

This mission trip was a life-changing experience to me in many ways, but to God be the glory because of the wonderful things that he has taught me through this mission trip to Flores in Guatemala. First of all, I went there with an expectation to preach to a bigger congregation in San Juan which was supposed to have an attendance of about 80-120 people. To my surprise, my district pastor there said that there were some changes and that I was going to be preaching in San Benito 2 which had a smaller congregation of 40 people when you compare it with San Juan. Deep in my heart I really like to preach and especially to the big congregation, and I have had a small experience with preaching on public evangelist meetings in Africa before where people would attend by a hundreds. Therefore knowing that I was going to preach to such a small audience with such a small goal for baptism, I felt so weak and somehow embarrassed, but I prayed that God would give me some strength.
So I asked my pastor to show me who was going to be my translator and he told me that I was going to know about that the next day which was Friday when I was going to preach the first sermon. In the evening, the president of the Conference picked me and my friend to go to the meeting, but he told us that we were not going to preach on that evening and we would start Saturday morning. So I left my computer and we went to the youth rally which was going on at central church. On this meeting we were introduced and somehow after I heard powerful song services my spirit was uplifted to think so big regardless of the fact that, even in this meeting, there was only one person represented from the church that I was going to preach.
On Saturday morning my driver picked me up to go to the church only to find ten people and the Sabbath school was going on, but I did not see or even know who was going to be my translator. I connected my computer and projector and before I finished, I was introduced to my translator who could not even answer a simple question like “how old are you?” I prayed to God that he would intervene and bring a good translator and more church members. I asked church members to join me in visiting church members in their homes and invite more visitors to attend our meetings. The same Saturday evening, I had a new translator from Minnesota who did not even want to come to the church because of her family issues but when she came she asked if she could help with translation because she felt like God was pushing her to do that and by Monday we had an attendance of 50 people, most of whom were backslidden church members that we had visited and few visitors that we had invited.
One of the visitors invited seven people for Bible study in her home and church because she wanted to know the truth about Sabbath, the state of the dead and other doctrines. Her mother had just passed away two weeks earlier and people from the Pentecostal church used to visit her for bible studies and she wanted to listen to what we would teach. We had bible studies in her house for three days consecutively from 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm. On Friday she received a call that she had to go in Guatemala City for one month and that changed the whole story. Otherwise based on three days of bible study she decided that when she would be back she would come to our church and learn more about our faith.
I have learnt that evangelism can never succeed without a ground work by the members which is a house to house work of teaching and sharing the love of Jesus which changes lives. Although at the end no one was baptized but my heart was satisfied and felt so peaceful that God had sent me to strengthen souls of those who were weak and sow seed of house to house work and evangelism among the members.