Jon and Jen Quast Learning Language and Culture of Paraguay It’s been years coming. Jon first felt God’s direction to missions with New Tribes Mission in 2004. Jen felt it in 2006. After years of training and ministry with our sending churches we finally arrived to the field of Paraguay 9 months ago. When you’ve been waiting that long to get started, needless to say you can’t wait to run as fast and hard as you can. No one forced us to come here. We willingly followed the Lord here. For us being here is a joy and a privilege. In May of 2011, we were fully prepared to give it everything we got. We were committed to putting in the time and energy to learn Spanish and Paraguayan Culture as fast as we could so we could move on a tribe who is still waiting to hear of what Jesus did for them.
Nothing can take the wind out of your sails more than when you are 100% mentally ready for the task, but you wind up going slower than you’d like due to circumstances. It can be frustrating when you’re sick, or when grocery shopping takes all day, when the bus drivers strike and you can’t get across town to do what you need to, when you have a wonderful day planned of outside language study and then it rains, or in our case these past couple weeks: when your bathroom springs a leak and sinks the floor in your bedroom and then they replace the plumbing and your bedroom floor.
The fruit of the Spirit is patience. So often we only focus in on the first 3 things (love, joy, peace) and forget that also the Holy Spirit is working patience out in our lives. While our workers were fixing our bathroom, I was impressed by the work the gardener was doing in the backyard. Our landlady had hired him to level off the backyard with topsoil and then plant grass. Now I figured he would do that with sod or seed. How surprised I was to see him open a bag full of grass, and then as he proceeded to cut individual blades of grass with the roots still attached and plant them one by one. He literally planted the entire yard one blade of grass at a time. It took over 2 ten hour days to finish. Never complained once.
We had such a great schedule planned not just for the week, but for the next 10 weeks leading up to Jen’s evaluation. Jen is really pushing hard to get in as much study time before the baby comes. We lost a whole week of study do to our house being a construction zone. (A week doesn’t sound bad but for math whizzes like me, you realize that she has already lost 10% of her study time leading up to her evaluation. That’s sounds like a lot more) It’s hard humanly speaking not to throw one’s hands up in the air when life “sets you back” from what you are trying to accomplish. Humanly speaking its very frustrating. But then when you step back and look at the situation from God’s perspective, you see that God is seeking to produce patience in your life, and that when you except the situation for what it is you realize that there is a lot to learn in the moment.
This week (really closer to two weeks) Jon got to go to his first soccer game with one of the guys who was working at the house. Jon has picked a Paraguayan team to follow, and one the workers is a fan of the same team so they went to a game. We learned what a normal work day looks like for construction workers. We got to observe how our landlady handled a situation where one of the workers charged her triple what had previously been arranged. Several of the tools and materials utilized were foreign to us so we learned what they call them here in Paraguay. The week didn’t have to be a lost week, but it could have been if we dwelt in the earthly realm of frustration.
So, we still don’t know how long this chapter of our lives will be. We don’t know when this chapter closes and opens on a new chapter of tribal church planting. Sometimes things may not go as smoothly or as quickly as we want. But the cool thing is, God doesn’t put timetables on his kids. He simply says to make the most of your time (Ephesians 5:16) and to be faithful (Matthew 25). And to remember that He is working all things out for good in our lives (Romans 8:28-29).
