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I’ve been living here in Puerto for almost 4 months now and survived my first semester as a real teacher! I feel so blessed to be a part of Manantial and what God is doing with this ministry and most importantly, I feel so blessed that Jesus chose me to be my students’ teacher.  Every day I’m reminded of Jesus’ faithfulness and goodness in both the mundane and simple things of everyday life here as well as the cool and exciting trips and adventures we’ve been on.  But if I’m completely honest, it has been a daily fight to choose to see God’s faithfulness and to see beauty and joy on days that are long and hard… and there’s been a lot of those days for me right now.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how Jesus knows how to relate to us.  He can truly empathize with us and our sufferings. He knows our sorrows and has felt our pain. I think about all the places that Jesus traveled to in order to bring the Good News to people in foreign places. Even with cultural differences and feeling at times misunderstood, I think about the biggest cultural difference of them all: Heaven and Earth. Jesus went from a place that was perfect, sinless, paradise and seated at the right hand of His Father to being born in a completely far off and upside down world. Full of sin, full of sorrow, and full of pain.

I can’t imagine coming here to earth, knowing Who you are and Whose you are, proclaiming to be the Son of God and being the hope for the world and then having people laugh, spit on you and mock you for what you have to say and bring. I can’t imagine knowing where you came from to now being surrounded in a place that’s far from familiar and comfortable to you and surrounded by people who reject you.  So when I start to feel some of these things too, I can rest knowing that Jesus has walked this path before me and knows how to meet me exactly where I am.

Psalm 116:7 says, “Let my soul be at rest again for the Lord has been good to me.” Every day when I wake up it is a real battle for me to choose joy and optimism. In the past, I’ve struggled with pessimism and anxiety and allowing my thoughts to dictate and cloud my judgments on my world around me. And in this season right now, it’s been easy for me to fall back into those temptations again and every day I beg the Lord to “take this cup from me” … Take this cup if it is your will, God. But if this is what keeps my knees bent and my arms lifted high, then God go ahead and keep chipping away at me. Keep refining me because I know in the end suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.

Jesus went before His Father in prayer and asked if there was a Plan B. To take this cup from him if it was his Father’s will. But if not, then He would choose to obey and trust His Father and go through with the original plan of giving up his life sacrificially for humanity. And that He did. So then, Jesus went back and saw that the disciples were asleep. Rather than staying awake, keeping watch, and praying, they fell asleep almost unbothered by what was taking place. Unbothered by the weight that Jesus was beginning to feel which was the wrath of God for all the sins of the world.  The disciples fell asleep unmoved and unbothered by what was being cast upon Jesus’ shoulders.

Jesus was more concerned about their sin than I think they were. How often is that me though? Far too often I’m asleep and “dead” in my sin I’m apathetic towards my sin and fail to recognize the weight that Jesus had to carry for me. I fail to see just how detrimental it is when I tiptoe back into sin that I’ve already given to Jesus. Things that I’ve already been saved and forgiven from. In this season that I am facing right now, I feel like every day is a spiritual battle and instead of choosing to feast my mind on things that are good, true, and holy, I’m giving in to the lies that Satan uses to trip me up when I’m fatigued and tired. When I feel like I have nothing left to give, instead of running to the One whose arms are outstretched for me, instead of clinging to truth, I run right back into sin that is comfortable and familiar to me.

When Jesus was baptized He heard the Father say “This is my beloved Son,” and knew that God was so pleased.  Everyone wants to hear this from their father. Knowing that when He looks at me He says, “This. Is. My. Daughter. And wow, I am so pleased with her.” His love is unreserved, unrestrained, and unashamed to be seen with me. Ephesians 5:8-14 says, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness, and truth. Test and prove what pleases the Lord.  Have no fellowship with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that is illuminated becomes a light itself. So it is said: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Coming here and being thrown into a new culture, a new job, I feel like I’ve had to crawl…no… drag myself across the halfway point towards the finish line. These past few months have been so difficult for me but I know in the end, Jesus is using this to break me but not destroy me. In Genesis, it talks about “from dust you came and dust you will return” and I feel like God has been taking me through a “dusting period.’ I feel like I’ve been stripped of everything that was once comfortable and familiar about myself, home, friends, and family, and in a way slowly being turned back into “dust.” But we know that God created each of us from the dust of the earth and I believe that the work He has started will be brought into completion in His perfect timing.  We will never see this work in full completion until we reach heaven but in the meantime, we are being refined and sanctified every day.  In time, we have hope that God will repair what is broken and until that time He is forming me more into His image and who He has created me to be here on earth.

-Shelby Davis, GEM Missionary

If you’d like to support Shelby as she serves with GEM in Mexico, you can do so HERE. You can also contact her directly to talk further about what it means to be on her support team and find out how you can be praying for her!

It seems like no matter where we go or what we do we’re always bombarded with love. Just turn on any radio station, flip to any tv channel, or open up any book and you’re likely to find that the main theme is love. With the way love is often portrayed, it’s no wonder that everyone is trying to find it! Most of us long to find that one person that will understand our quirks, remind of us why we’re special, support our dreams, commit to us and only us, stay when it gets hard, encourage us when life becomes impossible, and even more (if your list is like mine!). If God is love and is always working for the good of those who love him, isn’t that what He wants for us too?

In the book of Hosea, God gives us an up-close picture of what his love looks like by giving the Old Testament Prophet, Hosea, an extraordinarily strange command: Go and marry a prostitute.

Hosea 1:2 “When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, ‘Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness…’ “

What? Can that be what God said? Right when we think we’ve gotten to know the character of God, he throws a monkey-wrench in our neat and tidy Sunday-school theology. Oddly enough, God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute. But then he goes one step further, telling him that though she will be unfaithful to him and go back to her life of prostitution, He wants Hosea to keep pursuing her and buying her back. So, Hosea marries Gomer and they have children. Not long after, she returns to her old ways and even has a child with another man while still being married to Hosea. Yet Hosea, being obedient to God, finds her and buys her back from prostitution.

If you’re like me, your first response to this story is to shout, “God! This is so unfair!” How could God command Hosea, his own prophet, a man who probably sought God and loved Him more than the majority of Israelites at the time, to live this kind of life married to this kind of woman? How is this working for his good? How is this rewarding his servant for all the time he devoted to God? But my shouts for justice are only loud because without realizing it, I’m identifying myself with Hosea – the one who does right, the one who loves God, the one who is obedient to Him.

It might be hard to see at first, but in Hosea 3:1 we discover that through this impossible command, God is allowing Hosea to get a first-hand glimpse of what His love for him and the Israelites looks like.

“Go show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is adulterous. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods…”

Immediately my shouts for justice start to quiet down when I realize that I shouldn’t be identifying myself with Hosea… I should be identifying with Gomer! I’m the unfaithful wife who was once enslaved to sin. God is the faithful lover who has a Hosea-love toward me and has bought me back with the blood of His Son and given me a rich inheritance. Even now when I try to live my life independently of Him, He continually pursues me because of His great love for me.

I’ve been thinking about this story a lot since this past Christmas when my parents gave me a book called “Redeeming Love” by Francine Rivers. It’s a fictional re-telling of the story of Hosea that gives a more in-depth look into what Hosea and Gomer’s perspectives might have been like. After reading it, there were four specific characteristics of Hosea’s love that stuck out to me:

1. This love is sacrificial.

2. This love is patient.

3. This love is forgiving.

4. This love pursues.

The love songs of our culture, Hollywood’s romantic dramas, and even the best love stories all center around us. Before we know it, we begin to ask questions like these in our friendships and romantic relationships: What can I get from this person? How can they best love me? What can they do to lift me up or make me feel better? What kind of partner or friend will best suit my needs? How can I get them to support my dreams?

But a Hosea-love centers around the other person. It says: What can I give to my friend or partner? How can I best love them? How can I continually lift them up and encourage them? How can I make sure I’m meeting their needs? In what ways can I support them and show them that their dreams are important to me?

The love God gave Hosea for Gomer was sacrificial – he sacrificed his desire for a faithful wife and normal family in order to be able to show Gomer God’s faithful love to her. His love for Gomer was patient and forgiving; he didn’t blow up in her face over her adultery nor did he cast her out. On the contrary, he forgave her and took her back. Lastly, Hosea didn’t run from Gomer’s mess. Instead, the love God gave him for her drove him to pursue Gomer and buy her back from prostitution and adulterousness. In all of this, we see God’s heart: God was more concerned that Hosea got a first-hand experience of his love so that he was able to show it to Gomer than He was of giving Hosea a faithful wife and a comfortable situation. Instead of giving him a partner’s love, God gave Hosea something far more valuable and eternal – a taste of His own love so that he would be able to share it.

Hosea’s love ultimately foreshadows the example of God’s perfect, unfiltered love we see through Jesus. Through His life of obedience and death on a cross, we are able to clearly see the ultimate sacrifice, forgiveness, and pursuit of us. The love Jesus had for us was unparalleled because God’s complete love was in him and that love drove him to the cross on our behalf. He didn’t just sacrifice a comfortable life for you and me, he sacrificed his very life. He gave us his life and took our death so that we could give up our death and have his life. This exchange is the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate act of love.

When we experience this love it should change us and the way we love others. We’ll be so filled that we won’t need to look for love in anyone or anything else to fill the empty spaces in our hearts. As we are freed from needing others’ love, we’ll be simultaneously freed to love others with this kind of love. If God’s love is sacrificial, patient and forgiving, and pursues despite all obstacles then shouldn’t our love towards all of those around us be the same? It doesn’t take, it gives. It doesn’t look for what it can get, it looks for ways to bless.

Just like Hosea’s love for Gomer was a tangible representation of God’s love for her, is the way we love our family members, friends, spouses, and partners an accurate representation of God’s love for them? Let’s be imitators of Christ and love in such a way that people are brought to their knees because they see the beauty of our Father through us. This love is hard and other-person centered. It’s all about sacrifice. It’s far from the picture-perfect, fairytale kind of love our society teaches us to look for but so much more beautiful. This love acknowledges our deficiencies and restores us. It acknowledges our dead hearts and breathes life into them. It gets into the mess with us and despite the dirtiness and hopelessness, patiently loves us out of it. This is the kind of love that loves because it has seen and experienced the love of the Father. And those of us who have experienced it have the responsibility to show it to everyone we encounter just like Hosea showed it to Gomer and Jesus showed it to us.

Ephesians 5:1-2 “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

My Prayer:

God help me to love like you. My flesh is constantly battling to be first, but I know you desire for me to live a life of sacrificial love towards others. Help me because that’s not naturally my first instinct. This is a God-like love that I can’t muster up on my own. I need you every day, every hour, every minute to love like this. Would people see more of your character because of the way I love and would you change my heart every day to look more like yours.

-Maggie Addison, GEM Missionary

If you’d like to support Maggie as she serves with GEM in Mexico, you can do so HERE. You can also contact her directly to talk further about what it means to be on her support team and find out how you can be praying for her!

I have been praying about what I should share and I feel that God is wanting me to write about hope. God has been reminding me through a commonly known verse how much He loves me.

“For I know the plans I have for you, ‘declares the Lord’, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Jeremiah 29:11

Sometimes God places us in different situations in order to refine and grow us. However, the process of refinement is not easy, comfortable, or free of pain. Therefore, we need to completely lean on God and have hope in His ultimate promise of good that comes from challenging and painful circumstances. Knowing this does not mean that we should “fake ‘til we make it” and act as we have all together when we are struggling in the midst of a hard season in life. God calls us, as believers, to reach out to those He places around us, in our community, and to bear each other’s burdens. Through this, we can feel God’s love and be reminded of His promise of never leaving us or forsaking us, by giving us a physical gift of friends who can give hugs, pray with us, and share encouraging words.

I would also like to share the following verse that has been encouraging to me during challenging moments in my life:

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may peace. In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

John 16:33

All of this to say, I truly believe that God doesn’t make mistakes and that His plans are way better than anything we try to plan for ourselves. However, I do struggle at times to be content where God has me. Nonetheless, I know that I cannot do this life on my own and need God to guide me every step of the way, even if that means walking through very difficult times. At the end of the day, I know that God doesn’t have plans to hurt me but to give me hope for the future. If any of you reading this is going through a hard time right now, I want to encourage you to leave the hurt at Jesus’ feet and walk in His strength.

– Tracy Frohlich, GEM Missionary

If you’d like to support Tracy as she serves with GEM in Mexico, you can do so HERE. You can also contact her directly to talk further about what it means to be on her support team and find out how you can be praying for her!

It all started on a Friday afternoon. A normal 28-week check-up. Two first time parents excited to see their little boy on the ultrasound. And then the words that changed our lives forever; “this baby is not making it to 40 weeks.”

I wish that I could watch the next events take place as if I was watching a movie. I have forgotten so many details of the birth of our son, but there is one moment that has been etched in my heart forever. The morning of September 1, 2018 my husband, Chucho, came to my bedside at the hospital and said, “the doctor has been monitoring Noah’s heartbeat, and it’s been very irregular, and he says that in about an hour you’re going to have a c-section.” I felt excited and nervous (mostly about getting the epidural), but there was no fear. We had updated our family and friends, but I did not realize until many days later the number of people who were praying for us.

I have always known what prayer is, but until this trial, I had never experienced its power. I am generally a slow processor and four months later, looking back, I think, “how could I have been so at peace?!” There I was, without my husband, in a room without a single person who spoke English, about to meet my son who was coming two months early, and I felt not a single ounce of fear.

I have a quote written in my Bible that states, “I want a relationship with God where prayer feels as natural as breathing.” And after this experience, I have seen how powerful the gift of prayer is.

George Mueller, a man known for housing more than 10,000 orphans in his lifetime, is said to have over 50,000 recorded answers to prayer in his journal! He faithfully began each day on his knees worshiping the Savior in prayer.

In this world, it seems that prayer is getting placed on the back burner of a relationship with God. We feel worthy if we physically serve the Lord in some way or if we give time or money to help those in need. That satisfying feeling of accomplishing something in the name of Jesus.

But here comes the challenge, to me and everyone who has taken the time to read these words. Make time to simply talk and listen to Jesus. Whether it’s waking up 30 minutes earlier or choosing those free moments in the day to put down your phone, we need to make the eternal decision that Christ is beyond worthy of our time. I have felt the power of being prayed for, so have faith that your words are not in vain and choose the One who always chooses you.

-Sarah Quigg Santos, GEM Missionary

If you’d like to support Sarah and be a part of her financial or prayer team, you can do so HERE or contact her directly HERE.

Sometimes Jesus just seems too good.

In the month of December, as I spent time learning and treasuring the story of how Jesus came into this world I had a few moments where my heart couldn’t handle how sweet it all is. I can read about Jesus all day long, my heart and my life are committed to him and I love him so much but I think God gives us special glimpses… He lets us into His glory and it’s almost too good.

As I thought upon Jesus coming into this world and as I watched the Christmas program at Manantial, my heart couldn’t contain the intense awe that came over me. The fact that God came into this world as a baby. This tiny little baby held hope, truth, love, that would change the world. How wonderful. It isn’t the story people guessed or people want to really believe, but it is true.

In Juquila a few weeks ago, my husband and I stood in the town center and we saw three different people crawling into the temple. For those who may not know, the town of Juquila is known for the Santuario (Sanctuary) de Juquila which houses a 30 cm statue of the Virgin Mary, which has been venerated since the 16th century. In 1633, it survived, completely intact, by a fire that destroyed the village in which it was originally located. At the beginning of the 18th century, it was moved to its current location where the sanctuary was built for it. Thousands visit this Virgin from across the state of Oaxaca, other parts of Mexico and abroad. The people who make the pilgrimage to the virgin believe they will have more favor if they go in by more difficult means. We had heard before that people crawled into the temple but it was crazy to actually see these people right in front of us, looking in so much pain, knees bandaged up, crawling in hopes of receiving favor from this doll.

I just wanted to go pick them up and tell them how loved they were and that Jesus came to fulfill the law and all the things we could never do. God had made a way and there was hope. It’s too good. And it’s all about Jesus and Gods glory. It isn’t about us and something we must do, it’s about the heart of God and what He has done.

It’s hard for us to put down our religion, our works, our efforts. We want to make ourselves right before God. We want to crawl and suffer and be recognized as someone who has made great sacrifice and effort. Jesus and the love story he has written is beautiful. It’s utter humility, and it’s opposite of what this world tells us the way to freedom and being loved is. It seems too good to be true. But when we surrender to what we think or feel the way to the Father should be, there is a sweetness that is better than life.

“Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.” Psalm 63:3

-Annie Balsley, GEM Missionary

If you’d like to support Brett and Annie as they serve with GEM in Juquila to share the gospel with this unreached town, you can do so HERE. You can also contact them directly to talk further about what it means to be on their support team and find out how you can be praying for them!