In case you don’t know me very well (or have forgotten me in the past year and a half), I tend to fall on the more introverted side of the spectrum. Granted, I’m not the painfully shy, too nervous to talk to a stranger girl I was 15 years ago, but I still have my moments of timidity. Well, I have recently realized that I have been letting my introverted side win a bit too often.
When I moved here to Mexico, I knew that it would be hard. I would be living with a girl I barely knew, working with a team of strangers to share the Gospel with an entire village of strangers. However, after some time had passed things got easier. I got to know Candace, I got to know my teammates, and I even made some friends in the village. I was surviving in a world of former-strangers! So I kept going along, pretty comfortable with the little bubble I had built around myself. And then this week arrived.
For those of you who don’t know, during the week every year, here in Mexico the people celebrate “Todos Santos” and “Día de los Muertos”, aka “All Saints Day” and “Day of the Dead”. There is also a tiny bit of Halloween thrown in there. This celebration includes making altars for the dead, and cooking their favorite foods so that their spirits can come back and enjoy them. It is a celebration made up of a lot of tradition and many very confused ideas about where someone’s soul goes when they die. Last week Candace and I were traveling during this celebration, so we were able to easily avoid any invitations to participate in the festivities, but this year that is not the case.
We have received several invitations to join with various families here to eat tacos and tamales, and to be a part of the celebration this week. My first instinct was to lock the door, close all the curtains, and hide out in my room until it is all over. There’s nothing like a party for the dead to bring out the introvert in me. I would have followed through on this instinct were it not for one thing: God convicted me. He showed me that I was placing my personal comfort higher than the people’s need to hear the Gospel. Talk about selfishness.
So, because I am trying to obey God’s leading and do what He says, today, rather than stay home like I wanted to do, I made some soup and took it to some friends who were out selling flowers by the graveyard, knowing that it would probably mean an unavoidable invitation to some sort of party later (which it did). Then, instead of running home to give myself several hours to mentally prepare for said party, I went to visit another friend as she was working. This visit led to her commenting that no one can really know where they will end up when they die, they just have to hope that they did enough good that God will let them into heaven. Well, this opened the door for me to share with her that we actually CAN know, that God gives us assurance of our salvation when we truly trust in Him, that there IS hope for eternal life.
I don’t know if she will every truly give her life to God, putting her trust in Him, but I pray that she will, that God will somehow use our conversation today to draw her to Himself. I also pray that He will always give me the strength I need to walk out of that front door, no matter what the day may hold in store.
