Long time, no blog!!! This past month (aka month 1 in Panama) I dropped my phone and tried to stay off technology for the month. I have a blog on what that looked like coming up soon! But since you haven’t heard from me in a bit here is the rundown!
Team Table: The new team!! The girls I will be doing life with for the final months of the race! Hadley, Brook, Daisy, Callie, and Piper! We are named team table to represent and speak to the community that we share and bring! This group chases the Lord boldly and seek each other out with love and patience. Already this first month together has been so filled with the abundance of the Lord’s presence so I CANNOT WAIT to see everything He has in store for us!
the girls of Team Table!!!!
Where: Panama City to David to Potrerillos to David to Bocas del Torro!!! Crazy! We landed in Panama City, spent a 17 hour layover there then hoped another plane to David and got picked up by our ministry hosts. We drove to Potrerillos which is where the base is located and we primarily do our ministry in the surrounding area. Then after a month there we headed back to David to meet up whole squad for our mid-point debrief! After that we are headed to Bocas del Torro for the final 2 months!
While we are in Panama we are staying and working with YWAM, so daily life is more structured than it was in Costa Rica but there are so many cool opportunities this new way of life brings! Here is a little rundown of our days and weeks:
We kick the morning off with breakfast, all our meals are eaten as a community so our teams and everyone we live with on the base. Then we go into base wide quiet time for an hour and then a community activity for an hour after that! Then around 10 we start ministry, break for lunch at 1 and the pick back up with ministry till 4. From 4-6 we have free time, and then do dinner at 6. After dinner my team normally finds some intentional time together, talking about our days, what the Lord is walking us through, and just checking in with each other! Finally our nights sometime end there or we have spontaneous walks, worship nights, birthday parties, and card games in the big room!
This is our normal schedule Tuesday-Friday, Saturday we have adventure day, Sunday is church in the morning and prayer walking and evangelism after lunch, and Monday is our Sabbath.
Ministry: A big lesson we have been walking out this past month is how: life is ministry and ministry is life. There is not a time where we turn off our ministry switch. Our first ministry is with each other, especially as we have now been adjusting to new teams, we are learning about each other’s stories, what we are each walking through and how to walk through these things with each other. I was reminded the other day about how the community that we live out here is nothing we will probably ever experience again but the Lord has placed us in this season of our lives to walk out the hard things with the people next to us, that His perfect planning extends to who He has us sit at the table with while we walk out the hard things.
Ministry outside of our teams spans from prepping meals for the base to teaching English to the children who live on the Indigenous Campamentos to partnering with sustainable ministries in the area to help meet their immediate needs so they can continue their work to leading Bible studies for the students who live on base.
That’s what life looks like right now, lots of new experiences, new faces, and new ways of seeing and experiencing the Lord. After these few days in David we are headed to our final place for ministry for the last 2 months! It’s crazy to think that the next few travel days we have will be to final ministry, final debrief and after that home, but we are not wishing the days away anytime soon. Just learning to sit in the moment with what the Lord has given us now and seek His faithfulness and goodness as this season begins its final stretch!
