The month of July was highlighted by another group visit in the last week of the month. We hosted a group from Hope Church which is located in Monroe, NC. It was their first mission trip as a church and they made the most out of it. They were able to add two more sprinklers to the irrigation system, place the bases and home plate on both fields, visit and share the Gospel with four of the five communities we are working in, and provided laughter, joy and love to the people of Nicaragua. After months and months of work it is rewarding to see the baseball field taking shape. Now with the bases in place, and thank you Hope Church for your long day of work in the blistering heat, we just need for the rains to really start coming so that the grass will grow in well all over the field. It is always a pleasure to have groups come down and work along side of us to help with the vision and plan that we have. Groups always bring excitement to the kids and the community as a whole. They also bring manpower and can get a project done in a couple of days that otherwise would take a lot longer. So we are definitely grateful for the two teams that come down this past month but we are also excited to turn our focus to working hand in hand with the Nicaraguans to bring about a ministry that is going to be effective in the communities we are based in.
A devotional that one of the team members shared at the beginning of a practice touched on a simple thing that can easily be forgotten by many of us. In short, a story was told about how a baseball player thought he had hit his first collegiate home run by way of an in the inside the park homerun. Unfortunately the player had forgotten to touch first base and his excitement quickly turned to dissapointment as the opposing team threw the ball to first base and the ump signalled that he was indeed out. The analogy was made how Jesus is first base and if we forget to touch first base all the other bases are meaningless. How many times can we forget this in our own lives. We can get so caught up on going to second, third, and even home that we sometimes will “miss first base”. Be it career aspirations, personal goals, family matters, or even our daily lives if we forget about the most important “base”, Jesus, all of those other things are meaningless. Even though the world will not call us out, heck they might even be cheering us on and patting us on our backs, our Heavenly Father will know that we missed the mark. Jesus himself challenged us on this in Matthew, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet loses his own soul?” We can put together the most amazing baseball little league Nicaragua has ever seen with the best fields and the best equipment, and subsequently we would be praised by many for giving kids who have nothing something to be apart of. But, if we are missing first base as we round the bases then it is pointless. In Galatians 1:10 Paul sets clearly were his priorities are, “Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.” In a society of what have you done for me lately and doing what makes yourself happy, it is easy to get caught up in winning the approval of others and even yourself. Yet, the only approval that means anything is God’s and it starts by us touching first base.
July 2015 Update
The month of July was highlighted by another group visit in the last week of the month. We hosted a group from Hope Church which is located in Monroe, NC. It was their first mission trip as a church and they made the most out of it. They were able to add two more sprinklers to the irrigation system, place the bases and home plate on both fields, visit and share the Gospel with four of the five communities we are working in, and provided laughter, joy and love to the people of Nicaragua. After months and months of work it is rewarding to see the baseball field taking shape. Now with the bases in place, and thank you Hope Church for your long day of work in the blistering heat, we just need for the rains to really start coming so that the grass will grow in well all over the field. It is always a pleasure to have groups come down and work along side of us to help with the vision and plan that we have. Groups always bring excitement to the kids and the community as a whole. They also bring manpower and can get a project done in a couple of days that otherwise would take a lot longer. So we are definitely grateful for the two teams that come down this past month but we are also excited to turn our focus to working hand in hand with the Nicaraguans to bring about a ministry that is going to be effective in the communities we are based in.
A devotional that one of the team members shared at the beginning of a practice touched on a simple thing that can easily be forgotten by many of us. In short, a story was told about how a baseball player thought he had hit his first collegiate home run by way of an in the inside the park homerun. Unfortunately the player had forgotten to touch first base and his excitement quickly turned to dissapointment as the opposing team threw the ball to first base and the ump signalled that he was indeed out. The analogy was made how Jesus is first base and if we forget to touch first base all the other bases are meaningless. How many times can we forget this in our own lives. We can get so caught up on going to second, third, and even home that we sometimes will “miss first base”. Be it career aspirations, personal goals, family matters, or even our daily lives if we forget about the most important “base”, Jesus, all of those other things are meaningless. Even though the world will not call us out, heck they might even be cheering us on and patting us on our backs, our Heavenly Father will know that we missed the mark. Jesus himself challenged us on this in Matthew, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet loses his own soul?” We can put together the most amazing baseball little league Nicaragua has ever seen with the best fields and the best equipment, and subsequently we would be praised by many for giving kids who have nothing something to be apart of. But, if we are missing first base as we round the bases then it is pointless. In Galatians 1:10 Paul sets clearly were his priorities are, “Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.” In a society of what have you done for me lately and doing what makes yourself happy, it is easy to get caught up in winning the approval of others and even yourself. Yet, the only approval that means anything is God’s and it starts by us touching first base.