What next? Where next?

16 April 2012.  Our 9 month “season” of rest and reconnecting in the USA has at last come to an end.  Today we sit in Managua, Nicaragua wondering what comes next and where.

Well, in the short term we know what’s next.  By this weekend we will be in Boquete, Panama and enrolled as students in a Spanish language immersion program.  We’ll stay a couple months, Lord willing, and maybe, just maybe, we will go home semi-conversational in Spanish.  At least I think weeks of 4 hours of class a day should get us a little beyond ordering dinner at a taquería.

This part of “what’s next” is fun, at least in the anticipation.  I’ve been so excited about it that I’ve been using a few phrases I learned years ago in a community school evening Spanish class.  “Buenas tardes” I said to the official at Immigration.  “Hola” I said to Miguel, the taxi driver, and “me llamo Gordon.”  To the kind woman making up our room here at Nehemiah Center I even dared “¿Como te llama?”  She replied “Dora. ¿Y tu? “  I smiled, and with great satisfaction, replied “Gordon.”  But that and “gracias” is about the full extent of it.

So that’s our near future in a nutshell.  What about after that?  “God is calling me to some kind of justice effort.  Not like the American legal justice system,” I told the Nehemiah Center founder today, “but God’s kind of justice—something to do with the poor, the oppressed, and other down-trodden people God has so much concern about.  I don’t know what that picture of a justice ministry looks like when it’s finally painted, but that’s the basic outline of picture I see.”

Tomorrow we’ll begin to discover what some of the CRWRC's (Christian Reformed World Relief Committee) partners are all about and meet some of the people actually carrying out the work.  First we will visit with the folks at the Nehemiah Center in Managua.  The day after that we will visit the Christian Center for Human Rights and hear about their work all across Nicaragua.

We are very much looking forward to this.  But we are already hearing that as much as is going on here, similar ministries are also underway in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, and El Salvador.  There are many opportunities—and no shortage of need for volunteers.

So as we go about learning our new language, we must also listen and learn to discover where we are actually being called to go.  Tans go!  Ok,  … but where?