Several years ago while driving to Ohio from Florida we met up for breakfast with some friends at a diner in Georgia. We had finished our meal and were drinking coffee when the waitress came around with a coffee pot in one hand to clean the plates off the table with the other hand. As only waitresses can do, she picked up 6 of the 9 plates with one hand while filling our coffee cups with the other. Having joked with our waitress some during our meal and being a fairly gregarious personality I decided to challenge her.
So I said “If you can take all 9 of those plates and make it back to the kitchen with the coffee pot still in hand, I will give you an extra tip!” She looked at me for a second and then accepted my challenge with an “Oh yeah!?”
She picked up all of the 9 plates, still maintaining the coffee pot in the other hand and headed towards the kitchen.
As I watched her walk back to the kitchen balancing the plates with one hand and the coffee pot in the other, I thought about our lives as humans. We so often look like that waitress… We attempt to do the balancing act of life.
To make certain that everything continues to work the way we want it. We want to make certain that we have personal security, that we have relationships that don’t hurt, that we and our loved ones have good health, that we have financial security, that people around us do what we want or expect them too. We are continually balancing and attempting to maintain control over many things by ourselves.
We live with the illusion that we are succeeding at maintaining everything under control… just like that waitress taking the dishes back to the kitchen. However, in all of our balancing acts we forget that our feet are firmly planted over the earth. A solid place for us to stand made by our heavenly father. We expect that the earth will never move…
I live in Costa Rica. Where I live we have an earth tremor approximately once a month. We know that the earth does not always stand still!
We live under the illusion that as we balance the stuff above the earth we are safe and secure. However, once in a while God decides to allow or make the hardened earth beneath our feet move a little. This is usually in the form of a drastic change of something or someone that we always thought would be there… It could be the death of a loved one, it could be a bank-clearing financial crisis, It could be the rupture and loss of a very important relationship, It could be loss of home in a fire… Or it could be a world-wide pandemic in the form of a virus that shakes the whole world to the core!
…as our world starts to spin out of control all of the sudden we realize… I thought I had control!
…And God says “no, my child… but I do and I got you!!… because, in the end he does have the control and the moment that we think we have the control we are lying to ourselves and our faith begins to shrink! Remember faith is not the absence of doubt but the absence of control. When we have faith we throw ourselves back into the arms of our father and allow him to guide and control. That way we don’t get thrown off track by the moments when the earth moves under our feet and everything we are balancing comes crashing to the ground!
The waitress at the diner maintained her control over the 9 plates she carried as she teetered back to the kitchen and true to my word I gave her a large tip… But even She wasn’t in control!
The rubber has met the road! Our faith is being tested! Our world has been shaken hard within the past two weeks. As a missions and discipleship ministry VidaNet seeks to have faith that God has us in the shelter of his hand during this time. We currently have over 80 international people (7 different countries) in our staff and students spread all over Central America and even 2 in the US. Our Vida220 class that started in October is currently in their outreach locations and they are following the government’s guidelines and reaching out to those around them as best they can.
The travel advisory from the US state department came after most of the Central American countries had already closed their borders. Even so, four parents were able to fly their children home. Our Vida220 class that started March 5 in Pena Blanca, Honduras is continuing training with speakers speaking virtually form the US. Our participants in the Vida Global program are at home raising funds and waiting until they will be able to travel to Spain and Ecuador, which may be awhile.What we are holding to at this point is:
-Obeying government orders to maintain quarantined and clean.
-Our teams are staying in place, under quarantine, in their areas of outreach.
Please keep us in prayer as we walk through this era of God allowing the earth to be moved under our feet!
By DeLynn Hoover
VidaNet Director