The experience of working with and worshiping with Presbyterians from three cultures to raise a church in one week was absolutely the best mission experience of my life! That one trip had a profound effect on my faith and provided the spark that eventually led to our decision to move to Chiapas.
The two villages are 40 km apart. Our group would travel to San Javier each day to work on the church and return each evening to Lacanja for a relaxing bath in the Lacanja River, our evening meal and worship. But the trip between the two villages included 7 km of dirt road that bumped and jarred us around so much that we began to dread the trip each way.
Just outside of the village of Lacanja, in a lush pasture with a beautiful view of the mountains in the distance is a 200 foot tall banyan tree with massive fins rising 20 or 30 feet up its trunk. Each day as we were returning to the village after an exhausting day of construction on the church, and bumping along that road, we would come around a curve and see that beautiful tree up ahead. We would know then that we were almost home…almost to the place where we could rest, play with the children, be welcomed and fed and treated as if we were family.
That tree became the symbol of love for us that one week in Chiapas in 2002. It remains that symbol for me. I relived those emotions today as we drove past on the newly paved road to Lancanja and passed the majestic tree that still stands guard over a village that provided refuge and rest for a group of strangers. That same group left that village calling its inhabitants brothers and sisters in Christ."We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord."
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