Mission to Mission

I and 34 other Second Bers have just returned from our mission trip to Mission, TX, where we built a home for and along with Augustine and Laura Tejada.

Augustine is a day labor carpenter, who like so many others down in the Valley is doing all he can to provide a simple living for his family here in America. He, Laura, and the kids have been living in an old trailer behind the Baptist church we work with down there. Pastor Omar keeps the trailer open for families just like Tejadas. They are los pobres de la tierra - the poor people of the land. Yet with assistance from Pastor Omar, they managed to scrape together enough money to buy a small lot at the end of a cul-de-sac just west of the church. It was on that lot that we built their new home.

By the time we arrived Augustine and Pastor Omar had already poured the foundation. From there we went to work - building the frame, raising the trusses, putting down the roof, siding the exterior, plumbing and wiring the interior, setting the windows. Watching a house go up in a week is an amazing thing to behold.

And yet, it took a lot more than a week. It actually took months of planning and fundraising. And it took more than 35 of us. Thirty-five of us went down to Mission, but our whole church built the house.

On Wednesday we took a little time in the morning to pray over the home we were building. We took markers and wrote prayers and words of blessing on the still-exposed studs. It occurred to me as I stood there in the midst of the Tejadas's new living room that we were building more than a house. With my marker I scribbled the following from the Apostle Paul on one of the beams:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

The last thing we did to the house was hang the doors and install the locks. Then on what will be the front porch, we gave Augustine and Laura the keys to their new home. Pastor Omar translated as Augustine said thanks through a combination of Spanish, broken English and tears. He talked about the centurion in the scriptures.

"The centurion said he was 'not worthy' to have Jesus come into his home," Augustine said. "I have not had a home worthy of welcoming Jesus. But you have given me a home. Now I am worthy."

We had not only built a house for a family. We built a home for the Lord.

In fact, last week down in Mission we built the very Kingdom of God.