Doing the Will: Through It All He is Faithful

Faithfulness - Adhering firmly and devotedly, Worthy of trust or belief; reliable, Consistent with truth or actuality

These are the things of Christ. While I am an emotional roller-coaster, He stays the same. While I am unloving, and angry, He is always loving and consistently showing me His love. He is my rock while I am shifting sand.

Let me give you some examples of His faithfulness and my lack there of.

We began having weekly staff meetings as a coffee shop. I thought they were needed and found out that they were. But not exactly how I would have wanted them to go, I walk away from them every week and have to ask the question “Did that accomplish anything?”. Because sometimes actions speak louder words and we can all agree on one thing and the next day get back into the exact same routine as before. This week while walking into the meeting I didn’t even want to go. My type A personality was frustrated in thinking it would be pointless. I was in for a wake up call when the employees started thanking me for the weekly meetings, telling me how great and helpful they have been. Who would have known!

Or let me tell you of the boys/man/grampas that come in daily asking for these two American girls names, telling us we are beautiful and even being blunt enough to tell us they want to have babies with us or that we would make good wives. But let me tell you about Nova, a man who comes in everyday to read his paper. Who loves us, and a few days ago pulled aside a young man who was whistling at Gracie and started asking him questions such as “do you work?” “Do you love Jesus?” “You’re 14 stop trying to hit on this 18 year old” “And to have more respect for people”. Being respected by your regular customers is God being faithful, showing us we have people who love us and are there to protect us, this is just one example of how these people have embraced us with loving arms.

Let me tell you a story of God being faithful and calling His people to Himself. Luciano is one of our employees, every opportunity he gets to share Christ with someone he takes it. He humbles me. He has been talking to this one man for quite some time now and on Saturday night there was a fiesta in heaven because in little Hato Mayor, in Café del Rey, this man gave his life to Christ. This is God being faithful. This is the God I serve. And this is the God who is showing He works through faithful followers.

I can go on and on about the amount of faithfulness I have been blown away by. I just keep praying that I am faithful. Because its not about how many mochas we sell, or fretting about “Dominican time”, or worrying about money. What matters is to love the Lord God with all your heart, love you neighbor as yourself, and to spread the gospel. This is what we need to be about, because it is plain to see that this is what God is about. We are called to love people, young, old, rich, or poor.

It’s amazing to see the power of prayer. People here think “crazy” people should be cast out or frowned upon. It was amazing to watch our employees’ eyes as I began talking to this people. We have a man Noel come in almost everyday, sure everyday he asks me for five pesos (Noel that will not help anything) but I give him coffee for free and ask him how he is doing that day. He might be crazy, but we crazy love him right back because he is an image bearer of God just like me. We have a women who some believe is demon possessed come in at night, she will grab peoples drinks right out of their hand and drink them, she will blankly stare at you. My employees suggested we should just give her whatever she wants and get her out of there. I suggested let’s pray. She still comes in but has been disruptive. Sure she is crazy, but we are called to love people no matter how they act or what they look like. Thank goodness God does because if He didn’t I would never be going to heaven!

Yes we are called to work hard, and believe me we do down here, every night I crawl to my bed exhausted and just pray for enough strength to do it all again tomorrow. God shows His faithfulness through this as well.

And when He realizes it’s too much for us, He allows us to go to the beach, to baseball games, to have friends like Jessica, parties with Dominican music and friends, and go to bible studies. He understands we can’t exhaust ourselves of life because how could we be giving our best when we are on our last string. Again showing His Faithfulness.