Several students had an opportunity to travel to Mexico City this year for J Term. We asked each of them to highlight their trip from their perspective and share some things that the Lord allowed them to learn and experience. Nathan Van Dokkenburg is a Sophomore at FCS. Please read Nathan’s blog and continue to pray for him and other team members throughout the year.
This past J-Term I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Mexico City for a mission trip. One of my favorite parts of the trip was being able to lead worship at the Hornbrook’s church and also at Horizonte church. Worshipping God in a different language was really cool because that just reminded me of how huge God is. Even though I did not understand what we were singing, God knew and that is so eye-opening for me. Another one of my favorite parts was going to church on Sunday. At the Hornbrook’s church, the service started at noon and after the service everyone stays to socialize and play games. Because of New Year’s, we all participated in piñata festivities. After we got the piñatas cleaned up, a bunch of the kids and a few adults played 9-square for three hours straight. Even though we couldn’t communicate much, we all had a blast playing 9-square together.
One night Mr. Grass had us sit down by ourselves and think of a word or phrase to represent a spiritual goal that we wanted to accomplish in the upcoming year. He encouraged us to look through scripture to help us decide what we wanted our goal to be. Earlier in the trip we had been looking in Philippians 2: 3-10, which talks about being selfless, following Christ’s example. When I opened my Bible to my bookmark, Philippians 2, I glanced over to the next verses, Philippians 2: 14-15a, which say “14 Do everything without grumbling or arguing, 15 so that you may become blameless and pure.” I thought that this was perfect for me because sometimes I can struggle with not being happy or enthusiastic about some things that I have to do. Using this scripture, I decided to use contentment for my spiritual goal for 2017.