Chapter 2: Set Apart

In August, I moved back to Santo Domingo, after spending the summer with a host family in Santiago. Santiago had felt like a different country. The city was much cleaner than the capital, and although it wasn’t much safer, it felt as though it was. People lived close by one another, and I actually developed friendships with Dominicans from my church, instead of ending up with my American coworkers every weekend like I had in the capital.

It was weird to move back to the capital. I immediately missed the joy of discipleship meetings with a new believer in Santiago, Lourdes. I couldn’t get into living like a development worker from 8 to 5, and a tourist the rest of the time. I knew I was a missionary, not just a volunteer in an NGO. Yet even on the evenings and weekends, I was staying inside, cooped up working overtime on a project for work.

Around this time, I felt like God was teaching me again and again, through sermons and devotionals and friends, about everything being para su gloria, or for His glory. Even this loneliness.  

But on August 27^th, I wrote in my journal:

I’m tired of feeling like I am missing out. The real thing I miss out on with that attitude is what now is really supposed to be about—about loving God and others. I am created to love wildly, deeply, truly. Be the object of my love so I can live that abundant life You talked about—so I can be the crazy lover I really am.

Because, You first loved me.

The point is, I die without love. And the love I need is Your love—being loved & loving with abandon. These years are not wasted if I do that. There doesn’t have to be a single human object of my romantic love for me to be fulfilled and satisfied in Your love. There’s so much more. Don’t let me lose sight of that. Don’t let me lose my wonder. Teach me Your ways, O God. Teach me how to love again, to love like You do.

May the love of Christ dwell in me richly. Dwell means it moves in and stays all day and night and lives in me. Dwell richly means it doesn’t run out, because You don’t run out, and I depend on you to love, not on my own strength.

I felt a void inside, so I took a few different buses to the far end of the city to in search of something deeper. In June, someone praying at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, had given my brother David a small business card with the name of two pastors, a husband-and-wife team. I feel like your sister is looking for a family down there, they had said. I had just been praying for God to send me prayer partners, and give me a deeper sense of community with other believers, so tears came to my eyes when David relayed the message to me. 

Back in January, a friend had even painted a picture of water flowing over a desert to depict Isaiah 44:1-3. I told her I would deliver it to a house of prayer when I got to the D.R. But when I got there, I couldn't find any such type of ministry. But I just watched and waited, knowing somehow that God would provide, and leaving the painting on my bedroom wall until I knew where else it should go. Maybe these pastors were "it". 

The pastors listed on the business card were trying to set up 24/7 prayer, and had even named their church Casa de Oración, or House of Prayer. After switching buses a couple of times and being told several times by thoughtful old ladies to hold on tight to my purse, I finally arrived. 

Across the kitchen table with the man and his wife, I explained to them that I knew I was supposed to be in the Dominican Republic, but that I felt there had to be something more. I mentioned how my pastor in the Zona, or the colonial zone, had just shared that that area of the capital was the second in the country for trafficking of minors, and first in the number of homeless and drug abusers. The husband interrupted me,

“Impossible. It’s far worse here, where we live. I’ve been everywhere in Santo Domingo and this is much worse than the Zona.”

“I’m sure it’s quite bad here, too. I was just quoting what my pastor had read.” I replied.

“No, it’s worse here. Why don’t you move here and help us in this ministry?”

“Well, it would take me far from my job. During rush hour it would be a 2-3 hour commute each way. I already find myself with little time left in each work day. With a schedule like that, I wouldn’t have anything left to give your ministry, and I wouldn’t even be able to do my job well,” I explained.

“You said you aren’t doing what you came here to do,” he retorted. “So just stop resisting the voice of God!”

A bit flustered, I gathered my faculties to muster a calm answer,

“Sir, I am doing what I came here to do. I came here to be a Financial Analyst Fellow with HOPE International, and that’s what I am doing. I know that job isn’t glamorous, but I can see it is serving an organization which helps the least of these, and I support that. I just think there’s something else for me to be doing outside of my work time.”

At home that night, I remember feeling frustrated with what the pastor had said to me. Even as I left their house, he had repeated,

“Don’t ignore the voice of God!”

What if God really did want me to move in with them? I would think and pray about it, I said. Suddenly, though, God reminded me of the verse I had underlined in my Bible that very morning:

“Let no one cheat you of your reward, taking delight in false humility and worship of angels, intruding into those things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom all the body, nourished and knit together by joints and ligaments, grows with the increase that is from God.” –Colossians 2:18-19

It was only later that I fully realized that the pastor’s vain attempt to use a part of what I had told him and craft his “prophecy” about my life—and then call it God’s message to me—was exactly what this verse was referring to. 

There were other clues, too, that their ministry was about fame. They didn’t manifest a love for Jesus, but just a love for a big ministry and world-travels. He and his wife wanted an American to work in their ministry for their glory, not God’s. And clearly, it was their neighborhood that was in the most need.

But across the street from these pastors, a single mom had just moved in from the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. They didn’t have a sending church or agency, they didn’t have a monthly support check, and they didn’t really have a plan—just a purpose. That purpose was to see God raise up a spirit of intercession and 24/7 prayer and worship in this nation. This woman, Viola, became my spiritual mentor, prayer partner, and mother figure away from home.

Not only did God use this experience to teach me spiritual discernment and provide much-needed fellowship—He also used the confrontation to awaken in me a kind of certainty, a spoken affirmation of the purpose He had for me. When I said the words, “I am doing what I came here to do,” something in my soul rested.

Yet, I still wrote in my journal a week later,

Tonight I went offline in the middle of a conversation with Lidisset.

“Estoy aquí, solo que estoy escondida, jaja. –I am still here, I am just hidden, haha.”

“Tal vez Dios quiere que seas así por ahora, y después salir y hacer nuevos amigos y todo eso.—Maybe God wants you to be hidden for now, and then later go out and make new friends and all that.”

Yo no esperaba esa respuesta.—I didn’t expect that answer.

I was talking about my online status.

When she said that, as if it had to do with the way I am acting in general, I rebelled against it. Me? Escondida—hidden? That sounds boring. And lonely. Kind of how I’ve felt lately.

“Tal vez. No sé.—Maybe, I don’t know.” I answered. But I felt like there was truth in her words.

But sometimes I am so sick of being escondida. I am not used to it. I want a “better” social life. I want to “feel validated” in ministry. I want to be noticed.

I want to have something to take pictures of. I want to feel like my life here matters to someone—like I make a difference! Like I haven’t wasted opportunities to minister.

But maybe what I want is not what God wants for me.

Maybe what I need is to be escondida. Intimate before the throne. Escondida en la Roca Más Alta que yo. Hidden in the Rock that is Higher than I.

As I finished that journal entry, I shut off the light and drifted off to sleep. Little did I know what the next day would hold.