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Story and Photos by Rob Wilkins
In the high mountains of Honduras, the darkness is nearly palpable. The only source of light – a Coleman lantern swinging in a cross breeze between two iron-bar windows – casts dancing shadows on cinderblock walls.
“We appreciate the light more,” says Jim Pearce, who is leading another team of Grace volunteers on a missions trip, “when we know the darkness.”
Squirming in her white plastic seat, among the 50 or so crowded into this tiny church, Debbi Rayl prays to Jesus. She doesn’t know how grace has brought her here – and not just the ride up the mountain with a hired guard and gun, past the unseen vultures feeding in the blackness of a garbage dump.
In a country filled with beautiful landscape, and good-natured gentle people, this particular church thrives in a culture of hardscrabble lives, a modern-day equivalent to a den of thieves.
As hard as she tries to hold onto the notion – and in her own life proven reality – of the church as refuge, as agent of change and redemption, she can’t help but notice the flashing slivers of light from the window as she joins the Hondurans in singing.
A knife? The barrel of a gun?
Two guitars and a tambourine slice through the darkness, a current of praise.
Swallowing hard, Debbi glances out the window. A bracelet catches the fire, threading the shadows and undulating sea of faces with spasms of light, the kind that dances of water. Debbi takes a deep breath and finishes the song.
“What happens when you walk in the darkness,” Pastor Jim asks?
Debbi knows the answer. You fall.
Even in this very dark place, she can see how far God has brought her. Far more then the hundreds of miles separating Honduras from her home in Fairview, North Carolina, the greater distance has been spanned in her journey of faith. For the longest time, and for as long as she can remember, Debbi had been trapped in a devastating paralysis of fear.
“Some of my earliest memories from my childhood,” Debbi says, “were of me sleeping in my bed just terrified. I used to ask my sister to sleep with me so that I could put my back up against her. I was frightened someone would come in during the night and stab me or something. ”
It was fear, in fact, that brought her to God. “I wanted a God who could protect me, shelter me, and keep me from danger. What better person to keep you safe then God? If he couldn’t do it, then who?”
But well into her Christian life, the fear still ruled her life. After she married her husband, Michael, they soon had three children and her fear multiplied. “I could not look out the windows at night for fear of there being someone out there. I was afraid to be inside my own home alone even in the daytime. In many ways, the fear for those I loved was worse than fear for my own safety. I had less control over that.”
In her spiritual life, she operated out of duty. “If I was religious enough, did all the right things, pulled the right strings, kept all my commitments, I believed God would be pleased with me and bless us with a good life.” And, by that, Debbi understood: a life free from pain and danger.
A turning point for Debbi occurred when she began attending Grace. Fed up and burned out with “religious service to placate God,” she began coming to Grace on the recommendation of a friend. “I knew that my soul emaciated, unhealthy and dying. When I began to understand grace I knew I had been starving for."
More than anything she learned that grace was seeded in love and not fear. The perspective changed her life. “Slowly I began to learn that God really is love. Once I understood that God’s chief desire is love, it changed the way I looked at my own life. God wanted me to be about love, too.”
Paradoxically, for a short period of time, God’s love scared her to death. Instead of protecting her, God was calling her out into risky places. Gradually, step by small step, she emerged from the false shelter and shadows of her fear. And then, without warning, God called her to leap.
“About five years ago, I was sitting in the church reading the bulletin. There was an announcement looking for people to go on a missions trip to Honduras. This was the first time Grace had sent a team. It was strange but I had a real sense of peace and calm, and I knew I was going to go.” In the following years, God has used Debbi in a critical fashion to develop our relationship with a girls orphanage in Honduras.
Five trips later, from the corner of her eye, she watches the interplay of dancing shadows and stabs of light. Along with Pastor Jim, she prays.
“Jesus, drive the darkness out of my life.”
She prays with confidence, banking on a long track record of God’s faithfulness.
Through the fear, love is piercing her. Like light striking film, the memories are stored in what she refers to “heart photos.” They are moments of the joy and heartache of true service, the risk of loving, and the reward of giving yourself away.
The ring she gave Amalia, now 17, who watched her father murder her mother 12 years ago, and the ring she wears around her finger – the covenant of love between herself and Debbi. The image of two sisters, rescued from danger and abuse, reunited with their other sister at the orphanage – how the faces impossibly intermingled sorrow and hope. The way the light played on the face of a little girl, Erica, flooded with thanksgiving, hands folded in prayer. The belly laughter of Tina, a cook at the orphanage, doubled over by the bed, a language shared between two souls.
In the litany of never ending memories, the words of Pastor Jim bring her back to praise.
“Jesus you are our light.”
To this, Debbi says, “Amen,” and is confident in the darkness of even the deepest Honduran night.
“God is teaching me what it means for love to cast out fear.”
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