The first rule of mission trips that we try to teach people is that nothing...absolutely nothing...goes according to plan. You can have the best laid out plans in the history of mission trips but I promise they will change once you actually get on the ground. That's what happened to us on Friday.
We met up with a friend of mine named Tim for breakfast around 7:15 in the morning. Tim is a resident of Panama where he and his family serve as missionaries. He will soon have a new job title of connecting local churches in the states to local churches in Panama. For that reason I invited him to travel to David with us in order to meet some
of the contacts that I knew there.
Our short, one-hour, flight to David left at 9:30 and we were ready to hit the ground running. The plan was to meet Pastor Ricardo, who is a local pastor and is heavily involved in mission projects, upon arrival and start exploring ministry options. That was the plan...
When we were met at the church by Jim (a North American who lives in Panama) we were informed that Ricardo was ill and wouldn't be able to be with us for the afternoon. So much for the plan, right? Well actually that's wrong. On the mission field plans don't completely fall apart...they just change. We were ready to adapt and move on.
One of the things that we needed to do while in David was to find a tour option for our mission team to enjoy on their day off. After grabbing a homemade lunch we were off to the Pacific to check out some beach options. There's a great beach resort close to David named Las Olas but unfortunately they didn't have enough rooms available for our day off for our group...but that didn't stop us from enjoying the beauty of the beach.
After striking out at the beach we decided to head to the Panama/Costa Rica boarder to see if there were any options there for a group to enjoy on a day off. Unfortunately we struck out again. While it was pretty cool crossing the boarder into Costa Rica there was absolutely nothing a mission team could do in that area on their day off.
We may have failed in our quest to find a tour activity but we got to enjoy some of the most beautiful scenery on the face of the planet in doing so. We talk a lot about how big God is with the understanding that there's nothing we can encounter that's bigger than Him. Exploring His creation and seeing the vastness of it goes a long way towards advancing that understanding.
The day ended with us attending a Friday night Bible study at the local church we're working in partnership with. It was an amazing day but there's still a ton of work to get done. Including finding a tour option.
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