Safe, maybe not, but it was good   

So I was going to summarize my trip over the past few days… but then I didn’t have internet basically all week. Instead, I want to share about the week I had this past week then I should have time over the weekend to sit down and blog about my overall experience.

This past week was a cool one. As I wrote in my last blog, I was with a basketball team and four coaches from North Carolina as well as Joey Potter and his intern Robert. They were definitely a pretty cool group to be around; they were a good group of guys and a lot of fun to be around. In addition, they played ball with a lot of passion, a lot of intensity, sometimes maybe with a little too much intensity. Some days I think it helped in their testimony and sharing with the guys they had just competed against and other days I think it bit them in the tail a little bit. But one thing is for sure, they were a fun group to watch play and there was definitely never a dull moment. However, the cool thing this week didn’t happen on the court, it happened in a village here in the Dominican called Los Altos.
Los Altos is one of the smaller villages here, it’s further out from the SCORE complex than most other villages, and it’s become one of my favorite villages to visit. The main reasons it’s become one of my favorite villages are because their land is beautiful and the families there are so nice and very welcoming. So this past Monday we were able to visit Los Altos. We walked through the village, talked with the people that live there, and played with their kids. We were there only about 45 minutes because of miscommunication between bus drivers in the morning, and because of that I don’t think the team was able to truly let what they were seeing and doing sink in. But we got back on the bus to return for lunch and Joey told me, pretty adamantly as only Joey can, that we were going to feed that village. That he had seen the kindness and welcoming attitude in their hearts and that we were going to bless them by providing a physical need. I was in complete agreement with him and I was excited about the opportunity we were going to have in feeding that village. The cool thing is the situations that presented themselves the day we were scheduled to go back and feed them.

We were scheduled to return and feed them Wednesday afternoon. The guys would play a game in the morning, we would eat lunch, then we would buy the food and go back to Los Altos. Everything was going well Wednesday until about the time we left for the grocery store. On the way to the grocery store I noticed that clouds were starting to build and I’m not talking about the typical afternoon showers we get in Florida. The clouds that were building were crazy dark and filled about half the sky. There was no doubt we were going to get rain that afternoon which doesn’t sound like too big of an issue. And in just about any other village it wouldn’t have been an issue at all. But the thing about Los Altos is that it’s off one of the main roadways a good bit and the way you get there is by a very soggy, sticky, muddy, terribly maintained dirt road. It’s so bad that when we had gone on Monday the bus couldn’t make it down the entire road and we had to walk the rest of the way into the village. So Wednesday when there was absolutely no doubt of rain, I knew that dirt road wasn’t an option. If the bus tried to use that road there was a good chance we would end up stuck and maybe not just the bus, we might have ended up stuck in Los Altos for the night. Thus, I knew that if we were going to feed Los Altos that day there was going to be a little bit of risk on our parts… and Joey was thinking the exact same thing.

We were on our way to the village, the clouds had completely surrounded us, I was assessing the situation deciding that we were going to feed the village no matter what, and then Joey turned to me and simply said “I say we do it.” It was one of those cool moments where we had both been assessing the situation, watching the clouds, calculating the risks, but also realizing the good that was going to be done, and we had both, independently, decided it didn’t matter, we were going to feed that village. That moment in itself was a cool moment. The rest of the ride to Los Altos I couldn’t stop thinking about how C.S. Lewis describes Aslan, the lion from “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” who clearly symbolizes Christ in the book. It’s one of my favorite quotes, and I don’t know which character says it and the full context, but I’m guessing in response to a question they say "Safe? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good." It’s direct symbolism that a life of following Christ closely isn’t safe, nowhere I’ve read in the Bible guarantees safety when we’re walking in Christ’s footsteps, but man it definitely is “good”. What we were about to do wasn’t necessarily safe, especially in the eyes of five sixteen year old boys, but it was definitely good. We got to that dirt road and had to walk the entire road in which some parts the water had already started to rise above the dirt. However, we made it to the village, we were able to feed the entire village, and after we fed them we were able to hang out in their church, fellowship, talk, ask them questions, have them ask us questions, and just live life with them for about an hour. It was a great hour and you could tell they really enjoyed us sitting down and just talking to them. Nonetheless, after that hour we had to walk back down that dirt road to the bus. God definitely was looking down on us though because the whole time we were in Los Altos the storm moved very slowly and so they only received minimal rain while we were there. Hence, we were able to make it out of the village and down the road no problem; we just ended up a little more muddy and soaked than what we probably would have wanted. The entire visit and the nature of the situation made it an awesome experience and I truly believe that visiting and feeding Los Altos that day was the turning point of the week for the team and those boys by realizing the risks involved but also realizing the good to be done in that village and choosing to do the good rather than back down due to the risk of the situation.

I think a lot of times it’s the opposite reaction of a lot of people in the America church. We feel as if God wouldn’t call us into difficult situations or to do hard things. We’ll follow Christ and follow His teachings… as long as it already fits into our lives. We’ll follow Christ and His guiding in our lives as long as it doesn’t pull us away from comfort, away from friends and family, or as long as it doesn’t compromise out safety. It’s ludicrous if you think about it and look at how many of the men in the New Testament, including Christ, lived and realized that their true blessing won’t be on this side of eternity, but the other, longer side. This nature of the safety and risk taking following Christ in this life involves has definitely been something God has been trying to have hit home for me over the past few days. And every time I’ve thought about it, those words of C.S. Lewis pop up in my mind: "Safe? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good."

Mike