bah. i printed out the followup letter to my missions trip like a week and a half ago, but i've been so bad at mailing it out. i'm like in this awkward position where if someone asks how it went, i kind of just want to not tell as much so i can still send the letter out, but i guess that's kind of dumb, so i'll just post the contents below. and then i'll try send them out later this week
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Dearest friends and family,
Thanks so much for both your prayer and financial support for my missions trip! Praise God that we were able to raise more than enough funds for the trip (the excess of which will go into Peninsula Bible Church’s missions fund)! The trip was a smashing success and I’m excited to share with you some highlights of what happened during our time in Mexico.
As a brief recap, our team headed down to Mexico from March 25 to March 29 to serve with the local ministry called “Fundacion Emmanuel” by visiting prisoners and sharing from our lives and from the Bible. The team of seven of us included Doug Goins (church elder), Mike Benkert (college pastor), Libby Verber (college leader), Jordan Husband (Stanford junior), Elise Cyrus (Stanford junior), Kristen Yturralde (Stanford junior), and myself. For lack of a better term, I’ll refer to the current Stanford students and myself as “the four of us” throughout this letter. We expected to be split up into a few teams and visit different prisons during our stay there. It turned out much different than we expected, but also much more amazing than we could have ever planned. I’ll start off by briefly summarizing what we did before sharing more specifically about my personal growth and reflections.
The bulk of work was done from Friday through Sunday of the trip. On Friday we visited an adult prison in Pachuca, a town a few hours outside of Mexico. We spoke there at both the men’s and women’s side of the prison and that concluded the day. The remaining two days we spent visiting youth prisons. Saturday was by the far the busiest of the three days: we spoke to two groups of roughly forty boys each at the first prison, addressed a group of eighty or ninety boys at the second prison, and then broke up into small groups to speak with a few boys at a high security prison for boys who had caused trouble in other prisons. We spent Sunday morning attending a long service at the local church before the guys and gals split up to visit a boys and a girls prison.
As I shared in my support letter, I have always been somewhat apprehensive about sharing with non-believers and confronting that as being one of my reasons for going on this primarily speaking-focused missions trip. Yet as we arrived at the first prison, I was having started having second thoughts and wanting to ease my way into sharing. After Mike approached the four of us at the first prison and informed us that we would be the ones speaking, we hurriedly discussed what we were planning to say. I had this dreaded feeling that I would be nominated to go first, and of course it came true. I shared my testimony, specifically focusing on the story of Doubting Thomas and how God encourages questions and will answer them to those seeking truth as He did for me when I had questions about the historical accuracy of the Bible. Despite having a decent amount of experience with public speaking, I was still apprehensive at the start. But once I started, things just started flowing. It helped to have breaks waiting for the translator to finish so I could gather my thoughts and decide what to say next. By the time I had finished, God had changed me from uneasy about sharing to eager to share again so as to more accurately convey what I had intended to share. Being slow to learn, I always got that little sinking feeling just before sharing with any group, but once I started, God would again empower me to finish.
God also showed me a lot about relying on Him during this trip. Even from the get go, as we split up into different housing assignments, I was assigned to live on my own with Jaime, the Colombian founder of the local group who only spoke Spanish. I was hoping to bounce some ideas off of my team that first night, but instead I could only rely on my Bible and the Spirit just leading me to different passages that I might be able to share out of which would resonate with the prisoners. Throughout the course of the trip, I also ended up sharing from four different passages, which was a surprise to me. I was partly bored of sharing the same thing more than a few times, but I also felt led to share some different messages with different groups of kids. At times it was a spontaneous decision, something that grew on the way to a different prison, but from one of the passages that I looked at that first night. It was really neat to just be willing to share and have the Spirit lead me to share in different ways to different audiences.
God also did a great work building together unity among the team. Within our own team, God grew us closer together, especially among the four of us. Not only did we learn about each other through detailed sharing of testimonies with the prisoners, our shared ministry definitely drew together a sense of common purpose that allowed us to quickly bond. It was funny how I had known the three students in different capacities during my senior year and would never have guessed to be doing God’s work together with them a few years later. We were also able to form relationships with the members of the local ministry, living in their homes and sharing meals together. Our work was a blessing to them as they got a chance to let others do some of the speaking and had a lot of fruit to follow up with in the coming months. It was such a great experience for all of us that we were already talking about the possibility of a followup visit before we had even left the country.
Finally, I was just blown away by the way that God used the faith that we had to do a great work for His kingdom. When we went to the higher security prison for youths who had been trouble makers in prison, we visited the youths in their actual cell area (as opposed to gathering together in large common rooms as in other places). We split into three different groups, leaving myself as the only one from the PBC group teamed with some of the local volunteers. This was again another instance where the reputation of the prisoners made me uneasy about sharing and I was hoping to rely on the presence of some of my friends to help ease the situation. Yet despite all of these concerns, God provided me with four guys who were really attentive to what I had to say. Since three of them were confined to their cells, I spoke to a group of three of them at one end of the wing, just sharing my testimony of growing up with a fear of death and a lack of purpose beyond performing well. They spent the entire time listening closely and often nodding in agreement with the things I had to say. That was extremely encouraging and more than I could have ever hoped for. Then I went back down to the other end of the wing and started talking to a guy named Guillermo. He’s nineteen years old and had committed a bunch of crimes, murdering people for money and robbing folks as they left the bank. He mentioned that he had accepted Christ the preceding week with one of the local ministry workers so I was going to start sharing a passage of encouragement. But he seemed more interested in my testimony and how I hadn’t grown up Christian. So while I started sharing, he often interrupted with questions, but it was a great time. He had a similar sense of fear of death and still couldn’t quite grasp how he could be forgiven for all of the things he had done, convinced that he would end up in hell. The conversation varied from weighty topics such as that to just joking and laughing, sometimes about nothing in particular. It was hard to imagine someone as seemingly good-natured as him having done all of the things in the past. But there was definitely the sense that we had made an impact. At one point, he was lamenting about how he would still be in prison for another year while I was leaving the country in the next few days to return to the United States. And yet, at the same time he said he would be okay. As we were leaving that prison, some of the kids were asking when we would be coming back. You could sense their need for community and love and it was encouraging to see what an impact our short time there had imparted.
At almost every place we visited, over half of the audience responded to some sort of altar call with raising their hands seeking a desire to ask Christ into their lives. While we played a significant part in the ministry work that weekend, we continue to hold the local ministry up in prayer. We traveled from far away and gathered numerous people together to hear some of the Gospel message, but the tough followup work is still left to be carried out as the local ministry continues to build relationship with the prisoners. Keep praying that the seeds we planted during that weekend will bear much fruit!
Thanks again for your prayer and financial support! I definitely couldn’t have made it through without them. We’re currently in the process of putting together a website for the trip. The vision for it is to include more details on what we did each day, some reflections from various trip participants, and some photos. In the meantime, there are some photos from the trip that one of the local translators took, available online at:
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~hpan/mexico/. Feel free to let me know if you any other questions or want to know more about the trip. The full, detailed version would take pages to write and hours to tell =)
Praise God for all the wonderful things He did on this trip!
Love in Christ,
Hubert
