More Than We Came to Give | Trip to Reynosa
Our team was small. We only had 10 people from our church: Robert and Theo Balfour, Andrew Puccini, Adam Womble, Sam and Larry Laine, and Jordan, Emily, Gwen, and Clare Snook. We all knew of each other, but did not truly know one another. I remember sitting down to lunch at a hole in the wall BBQ spot in the middle of nowhere Texas, looking around the long table of our group and thinking… well this is going to be interesting.
It only took us four hours to arrive in McAllen, TX where we were met by two members of the Isaiah 55 Ministries team. We all loaded up in their vans and they took us over the border to Reynosa, Mexico. In just 20 minutes, we went from a well developed, prosperous city to an overwhelmingly poor and deprived community. A singular wall is the only thing that separates the two.
We were the first group to arrive to the compound! We quickly picked our bunks, made our beds, and settled in. Once the kids discovered four square, we never saw them again. Later that night, our small group of 10 grew to just over 50. To our surprise, 60% of this group were under the age of 16! Dinner and orientation began. The ministry set clear expectations for the week and took our phones. First up on the agenda… rest! We have been introduced to the sabathing practice at church, but this felt more like an advanced class that no one was really ready for. The ministry took care of everything: cooking, cleaning, and planning our activities.
Sunday arrived and we had the opportunity to attend church with the ministry and some of the locals. As one would expect, it was all in Spanish. However, the worship songs were easy to recognize. No words can describe what it is like to worship alongside your Spanish speaking brothers and sisters. It was certainly humbling as we stumbled over hard to pronounce words, but it was also beautiful to be so welcomed and a part of their community. We couldn’t understand each other, but we felt connected because we were worshiping the same God together. Later that day, the ministry took us to a brand new museum and coffee shop in Reynosa! We got to learn more about Reynosa and its beginnings. The coffee was outstanding! Little did Robert know that when he picked up a bag of coffee beans he was signing up to be our personal barista every afternoon.
On Monday we were all assigned a team. The ministry had five different projects that they had been working on throughout the summer - Road Crew, Tiling, Stuco, Demolition, and VBS. The Balfours, Adam, Sam, and Andrew were assigned road crew, Jordan was on tiling, and the Snook girls were on VBS. It is safe to say that we were all quickly humbled by our respective jobs. Nothing can ready you for what God has prepared to teach you in the most simple tasks. From the overwhelming patience needed while working with a large group, the reflections that stem from witnessing a 10 foot sunflower in the middle of a city dump, and the feeling of being utterly useless but forever changed by the simple conversations and actions of orphans.
We spent only 6 days at Isaiah 55 Ministries. We worked from 9AM-4PM, Monday through Thursday. In this time, our road crew took an overgrown and filthy section of the street and turned it into a safe and clean sidewalk for the locals, tiling finished a beautiful space for the mission to use for VBS and many local events, stucco and demolition made a huge dent in creating more rooms for the mission’s compound, and the VBS crew successfully ran an event for 120 local kids. No matter which crew you were a part of, we all learned a little bit more about ourselves. Each day, God showed us something within ourselves that we had been blind to. And each day, we got to share with our team what we learned. We started out as somewhat strangers. We went from surface level, nothing conversations to real, meaningful, and sometimes humiliating confessions. We left Grace Northridge on Saturday thinking that we were going to Reynosa to help change lives, but it was God that truly did a work within us. Clare said it well… this was better than summer camp.