Mexico Musings by Keith Eiginger

THE JOURNEY BEGINS…

My journey deciding to take a fourth trip down to Mexico, and then the trip itself has been an incredibly challenging, stressful, heart-changing, humbling, refreshing, and unbinding experience. Those are quite a few very different ways to explain the journey my spiritual and physical body have taken from the moment I decided to go on this trip, but each one of these descriptions have very in- tensely come to fruition during this incredible experience.

Last summer, after I had been sitting on the plane just as I am doing now writing this story, I had decided that it didn’t make sense for me to return again to Mexico the following year. Many had been telling me that is was time for me to focus on other parts of my life since I was beginning to work my way through college and needed to focus on getting the rest of my life started. I had let others make the decision for me that ultimately was not what God had planned for me.

I wasn’t fully aware of this until months later when I returned home from college for winter break. I had been driving my brother to youth group on Wednesday nights. I hadn’t thought about Mexico since the plane ride home the previous summer. One particular evening, not 30 seconds after my brother had walked in the church building, I felt a fire light in my soul and God laid on my heart that I needed to return to Mexico.

Not having thought about the possibility in months, I found myself walking through the church doors, checkbook in hand, 30 seconds later. I handed Diana my deposit check for the 2017 Mexico Mission despite the many voices and worldly reasons telling me not to. This proved not to be the end of my struggle; I returned back to Miami University for my spring semester with my spiritual life on the back burner.

Since my college time began, I had been very actively seeking for a spiritual home where my faith could grow weekly. Up to this time, two and a half years later, I still had not found a place God had called me home to. Without a weekly faith group, it became increasingly easier to put the desire to seek God’s word and wisdom out of my mind. Without any experiences to fuel my faith growth, I became extremely spiritually stagnant. This led to my becoming emotionally stagnant as well. I found myself developing many friendships outside my faith; friendships that weren’t real strong spiritual relationships. As a result of my dry spiritual and emotional outlook, I found myself to be in a very bland emotional state by the time summer hit and our Mexico Mission preparations began…

Karl Eiginger

See next month’s Eagle to see what happens!