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Old Updates: The One About Building a Church

3 min read Old updates
Daniel & Amanda Buck
Old Updates: The One About Building a Church
Photo by Dakota Roos / Unsplash

Summer 2018

The main story

Szentmargitfalva is a small village in Zala County, Hungary in Western Hungary. For most of you, that won’t mean anything, but it’s pretty close to the borders of Slovenia and Croatia. On our Team blog there are two great articles describing how we got connected with this project (pt 1, pt. 2).
Over the last few weeks, I have found myself working in the middle of nowhere. The little blips of internet and cell service I have gotten so comfortable with in the big city of Budapest were gone, and for the first time in a long time, I was surrounded by green and could hear birds loudly singing everywhere. A lot of what I have been doing for the past few months in ministry has been foundational work. Learning the language, figuring out the culture, and all of the bumps and bruises that come along with moving half-way around the world. As I find myself heading into my ninth month, I am also finding myself in my first wave of culture shock. It was in this time of feeling tired and worn thin that I hopped into the team van and headed west, out into the middle of nowhere to work on the chapel.
And it was because of this change of pace that I’m realizing all over again how strange and wonderful God truly is. As I was working on the chapel, I couldn’t help but think of all of the mission trips I have been on in my life and the manual labor that was usually paired with them. Getting to feel the same feelings of banging on a piece of wood with a hammer, the mechanical feel of a drill putting in a toe-nail screw, and the distinct feeling of shoveling dirt from a pile into a hole. I got to be that seventh grader again who realized that God was calling him to the mission field and relived some of the experiences I made with friends on those trips.
Remembering what God has done in our lives is an important thing, a necessary spiritual discipline, even. Throughout the Bible, the Israelites refer to the past over and over again. They would have feasts and celebrations as ways to remember what God had done for their people and to remember that if He did it then He would still do it now. Part of God’s very character is His faithfulness, and remembering His provisions in the past gives us tangible hope for the future. Just as this trip has reminded me why I am serving in Hungary and has given me encouragement, I would encourage you to remember how God has worked in your life in the past.Psalm 42 is riddled with this balance of future and past, discouragement and hope. David laments how his soul is downcast, but he will remember God and praise Him for His enduring love and faithfulness.

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