Last week I had the opportunity to spend a week in Nicaragua. Sandwiched smack-dab in the middle of Central America, about 1,500 miles from the comforts of Georgia, it is the poorest country in Central America. When I applied in November to participate in my school’s mission program, I was not expecting to be placed on even the Atlanta trip. Yet when I was placed alongside fourteen other boys to go to Nicaragua, I was enthralled. It would be my first time out of the country besides little side trips to Canada and the Bahamas before you needed a passport to travel by land or sea; but it would also be the first time I discovered myself.

Months of getting passports, continuous meetings, sharing my testimony for the first time, seemingly ceaseless prayer, commissioning in front of the entire community, and packing a single duffle bag to the gunwales led to one week, March 18-25, 2017, spent in the cities of Nicaragua. We were led by missionaries Carl and Kathy Most, “gringos” who had spent the last nineteen years in Nicaragua (I say “had” because in several months, they will be moving to Cuba to do some work there). As soon as we landed, we took a school bus to the missions center we now called home and went to bed (it gets dark pretty early at this time of year because Nicaragua does not observe Daylight Savings). On Sunday, our team went to an international church (who spoke English), was introduced to the ministry, learned about poverty (which, to many of the students on the trip, was a culture shock to say the least), and then visited one of the slums of Managua, the capital, where lived some of the missionaries favorite converts, gang members whose gang broke up after its leadership came to know Christ. Hearing the stories of men who came from the brink of death to everlasting life motivated me to no end because thitherto I had been struggling a lot with procrastination and other assorted issues. Now I know that the Lord is in my corner, and that he is always going to protect me, no matter what happens. I’ve been praying for a while and am starting to see results.

The next day, we learned how to blacksmith at the ministry’s vocational school and then made a four hour trek to Estelí, the country’s second largest city. This was particularly painful because my parents were only an hour away in nearby Jinotega, and yet I would have to remain separated until we reunited at the airport in Managua at the end of the week. Fortunately, while the rest of the kids on the trip made complete fools of themselves in a soccer game against some local kids, I played with smaller kids in the bleachers, which reminded me of just how much of a light I truly was, even without my parents’ guidance. We swapped more testimonies, and while not all the soccer kids believed at that moment, I continue to pray that they will one day receive their hydration from the Water of Life.

The next day, we made concrete to put in a pastor’s floor, and that night, we were watching War Room outdoors in Spanish when suddenly, the power went out. At first, it was pitch-black, but then, as my eyes adjusted, I saw more stars than ever before. The last time I saw nearly that many stars had been in Arizona with my old school, but here, I could even see the Milky Way. That, I thought, is truly how great our God is—that he would allow us to see so much from someplace so infinitesimally microscopic in the larger scheme of creation. I had never felt so small—or so good; because I felt like I could see more, it reminded that my life at Wesleyan is a fuller life than the one I led three years ago at Mill Springs. Five minutes later, the power came back and we packed up, but I still pondered that glorious moment when—quite literally—God’s light shone through powerful darkness.

The next two days, we went to a local “K-12” Christian school and interacted with the children; my Spanish flourished as never before, as I had a Colombian native who doubled as our Spanish teacher leading the trip, and also because it was pretty much the only important language anyone in Nicaragua was interested (although one kid at the school asked me to speak in French, which I did with great ease since it is my second language). Whether watching soccer, singing my favorite songs, touching a cow, or watching the remake of Ben-Hur in Spanish, my linguistic skills grew relationally as I was able to converse with and show compassion towards these disadvantaged children (many of them came from rough families; four were deaf, and several were on the autism spectrum). For the first time, I could feel the Lord moving me to be a force in these children’s lives. I just hope they won’t forget us.

Then, we went back to Managua, took a day off to be tourists, and finally went home, but Nicaragua still left an indelible impact on my life. My only hope, in the long term, is that I will show the same grace and love in the States that I showed in Central America. Yet I know, because of the new family I developed in Nicaragua, “I will, with God’s help.”