Naomi Stephenson is a Teacher Education major, who served as an intern in Honduras on a team with 6 other students from The Master’s University, as part of a collaboration between the Global Outreach (GO) program and MEDA International Missions. In this interview, she shares about how this mission pushed her to burst her comfort bubble and reevaluate her global perspective.
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Naomi landed in Honduras in May of 2023, having never left the United States or been on a mission trip before.
“I [had] never done anything like this,” she says. “I [had] always been a hermit my entire life. The first time I left Southern California, I was 18 years old.”
Despite her qualms, she ventured to a third-world country with minimal language skills and maximal courage, knowing that her education was coming to a close and it was time to broaden her ministry lens.
“I knew that I was very comfortable with the life that I had because I never left it,” she says. “This was a great way of emptying myself in a way that I had previously never done.”
During her time in Honduras, she used her native language expertise to help Honduran students learn and practice English at an organization called Just One International, as well as tutored the children of a missionary family.
Her Spanish-speaking skills, however, were still a work in progress, and she was hard-pressed to find new ways to communicate.
“Because Spanish is not a language I speak, I [had] to rely a lot on nonverbal cues, and I [couldn’t] effectively use those if I [didn’t] understand what [was] and [wasn’t] offensive,” she says. “I [didn’t] want to offend a group of people that [I was there] to specifically minister to.”
As she made efforts to speak in the universal language of nonverbal communication, she knew that God had allowed for her to be in that position of limited verbal proficiency for a reason, and she found comfort in the unity of the global church.
“It was really encouraging seeing people worship God in a language that I didn't understand, and it was so comforting to really see a manifestation of how God is not bound by language, and He is not bound by land,” she says. “Even though I didn't understand the words, I understood the passion, and I understood the love that each of these church members had, because I had it too. Because we both have a love for Christ.”
Through this struggle, she discovered an aspect of Honduran culture that allowed her to bridge the language barrier and reframe her perspective of short-term missions as a whole.
“I think that Hondurans speak through food,” she says. “And they take meals very seriously when it comes to connecting with people.”
This relational aspect, in stark contrast to the cool efficiency of America, illumined her prior concept of hospitality.
“I'm just used to giving them a hot meal,” she says. “But a hot meal is the least of what they do. They pour their lives into you, and they share with you their heart, and they desire to know your heart – and that's the true meaning of hospitality here in Honduras.”
She recognizes that the impact of this approach is more than a new and warm take on hosting others. Rather, it rounds out a biblical understanding of hospitality and thus has the potential to be a platform for ministry.
“They [Honduran believers] see everything they have as a ministry opportunity, and though they barely have anything, they use that 100% for other people,” she says. “That's something that I want to take back to America – not just offering my services but completely emptying myself so that others can feel known and loved and welcomed, because that's what Christ did. He emptied Himself for other people.”
This giving nature is what shattered her expectations and contributed to the culture shock she experienced when entering a context that she didn’t previously know or understand.
“I had a very ignorant view of what short-term missions was,” she says. “I heard the term third-world country, and I thought people hunted for food and you would find no clean water within a 30-mile radius. I would see that my view was ignorant to the point where I didn't expect for them to offer me anything. And that was completely the opposite of what happened. These people gave to me way more than I could ever give to them.”
Even though Naomi couldn’t speak much Spanish, her growing pains are a living testimony to the fact that we are the Lord’s chosen instruments, and His Word will complete what it set out to do, whether it’s by the means we imagined or not.
“God always accomplishes goals how He wants them to be accomplished, and so I really got lots of opportunities to be the Gospel rather than preach the Gospel…through loving one another and through emptying myself and…sacrificing my safety nets of my family and my friends. And God used that to meet my goal in a different way than I expected.”
Naomi graduates from The Master’s University this year and continues to remotely serve missionaries in Honduras to this day, creating an expanded English curriculum for the students of Just One International, based on a successful trial run she contributed to after her internship last year.
A Just One student presenting his final project in English class, just before receiving his certificate of completion.