The Meet Hope Podcast

109: Embracing Silence: A Journey of Faith and Transformation in Guatemala with Christian Boynton

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You're invited into a conversation with Christian Boynton about his transformative experience serving in Guatemala with the Peace Corps. Through personal stories, he shares how the power of silence and community impacted his faith and understanding of God’s presence in daily life. If you are contemplating how you can listen for God more in your own life, don't miss this one! Special thanks to Christian for sharing his story and experiences with us!

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast, where we have conversations about faith and hope. Hope is one church made of people living out their faith through two expressions in person and online. We believe a hybrid faith experience can lead to a growing influence in our community and our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope. Our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast. I'm your host, dave Falcone, and I'm excited to be here today. And here with me today is Christian Boynton. Welcome, christian, thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, christian, you and I have known each other now, for I don't know how old are you now 25. 25. All right. So we've known each other for about 13 or 14 years, dating back to when you were in sixth grade and I was the youth pastor and you were a goofy little kid running around the building.

Speaker 3:

You saw me at my absolute lowest.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes I did, and if this podcast was longer, I could share lots of stories. So how many years have you been out of college? Two and a half, two and a half, and you graduated from.

Speaker 3:

James Madison University.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and so for two and a half years you've been out of college. What have you been doing?

Speaker 3:

Well, I was looking at the job market after college and just didn't see anything truly fulfilling. I feel like, you know, the data entry uh specialist, or like marketing rep. That just wasn't, you know, fulfilling for me. So I applied to the peace corps and uh got in.

Speaker 3:

Originally I was, you know, scheduled to be in the youth and development sector working with kids, and as soon as I got the letter of acceptance and that I was put in that sector, I was thinking, I was like I don't think I have the energy to do this for two years, like working with Guatemalan kids. You know, the Spanish alone is going to be tough because I was put in Guatemala and uh, then, three weeks later, you know, after praying about it so much, uh, I got a call from the uh director of the community economic development sector and she said they had a spot open and uh invited me in. So I I gladly accepted because that's, you know, geared more toward my strengths. And I prayed about it so much and I gladly accepted because that's geared more toward my strengths and I prayed about it so much and I actually told my mom.

Speaker 3:

I was like I don't know if I should do this and she was like what? You've been so excited, why wouldn't you do it? And I was like, all right, all right, I'm just going to pray about it, and so you were stationed with the Peace Corps in Guatemala.

Speaker 2:

You mentioned a few moments ago when in Guatemala Totonicapan- so that's in the western region of Guatemala.

Speaker 3:

It's actually the 42nd highest city in the whole world in altitude, so it was super high and really rural. Really, you know deep into the Mayan heritage and also the new. You know Christian, catholic or evangelical. You know worship.

Speaker 2:

So, with that in mind, tell me a little bit about you know. What was the experience like for you? What did you learn? You know, how did your faith grow? I'm throwing a whole bunch of questions out there to kind of, you know, peek your brain into you know, just sharing about your experience.

Speaker 3:

Sure, anyone who knows really anything about Guatemala or has been there, silence won't be the first thing that comes to your brain. It's one of the loudest places I've ever visited. I was just talking to my sister the other day and we of the loudest places I've ever visited I was just talking to my sister the other day and we were going through all the countries that we visited and you know visiting you know 23, 25 countries this one is definitely the top of the list of the loudest experiences. Like, when my parents came, they were woken woken up at 5 AM at by, you know, parades in the street and, uh, people, just you know, singing and dancing and everything, and it's it's a really loud place, but I found a lot of importance in silence and the way that it could be used and the way that, um, people use it to create or to destroy, and what do you mean by that? Yeah, so I think maybe, starting with the creation part, we can create so much within ourselves. Well, god can create so much within ourselves through silence, and I've been doing a lot of Christian contemplation and if you don't know what that is, there's a very ancient practice around this of meditating on the word of God and I think creating just more spaces for God to enter your life has been so important to me in, you know, opening up and not, you know, having to articulate anything, not having to you know, put it into great words or a perfect setting, you know with like candles and blankets and whatever, um, just opening up the space and you know, sometimes even like grunt praying, just like God knows what's on your heart and if you just like, oh, like God knows what that means, god knows what's going on. You don't have to articulate anything beautifully. Sometimes that distracts me from what the purpose of my connection and the spaces with him.

Speaker 3:

So I've been using the silence that I now find really abundantly in the United States to do that. But I got really good at it because, you know, shutting out all of the noise around me in Guatemala kind of forced me to, you know, not be distracted by by everything. I lived on the roof of my house in Guatemala and everyone puts their dogs, their chickens, their you know whatever, on the roof and you know, gives them food, and then they just make a bunch of noise all day. Um, so I was, my neighbors were dogs and chickens and things, so, um, so that was really fun every morning. But, um, also there's there's spaces to be silent, and I feel like now in the United States, the silence around personal dedication to religion has been really hard to navigate.

Speaker 3:

I feel like maybe it's the people that I'm surrounded by, or maybe it's the, the things that I intake in social media, but it's really hard to um come back to because some everyone's so um, everyone's so forward with their uh dedication to the Lord in Guatemala and, coming back, it's not, you know, que Dios te bendiga, which is like, may God bless you, and they say that everywhere. They say primero Dios, like if you're having a conversation and you know you hope something happens in the future, it's like you know God first, primero Dios, and it's just the center of all conversations. And you know, being being a Christian uh, my whole life. I feel like that definitely has a huge part in uh, in everything that I do. Um, and just like I was saying before, with um the job search after college, I wanted to do something that was uh, directly in step in lockstep with God, cause I know that creating my own fortune and creating my own person and trying to promote myself isn't isn't gonna get me anywhere. Um purposeful that's not going to lead me anywhere.

Speaker 2:

Purposeful that's not going to lead me to a purpose-filled life, and it seems like that goes back to what you were saying, that Spanish word.

Speaker 3:

One was primero Dios, and the other one was que le vaya bien. Or bueno, now I'm just talking in Spanish. Que Dios le bendiga.

Speaker 2:

So which one was God first, primero Dios. Okay, so you said and I don't know if you hinted at this or just kind of just came out and said it, but this mindset there of that that you know, god be first, not God is here to serve me yeah, want to throw that on America, but you know, I think that we as Americans often lean towards the ladder there of you know God's here to serve me, which is not true, you know. So we're clear on the podcast. You know it's the other way around, it's God's will first. And so you know, how did you, how did you navigate that idea within within your experience, within the challenges you had in Guatemala?

Speaker 2:

As somebody who has been around the world like you have, I've also been abroad a number of times. I've done numerous mission trips over the years. We're actually planning a mission trip to Malawi coming up in June. You know, one of the things I've always found incredible with these missions experience, especially missions abroad, is how you experience God so much more uniquely in these international locations, these very different cultures. You know how people view God differently the same God, the same faith, but how they view him differently. You know, I feel like that's so unique for anybody that's listening that has never been abroad or experienced that, you know. I don't know if there's anything you can talk in regards to that as well.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So, first things first, you know God serving you and you serving God and having that harmony between your purpose and your relationship with God. And I have a tendency not to use the word religion anymore because it's very scary, it's a very scary word, it's very scary. It's a very scary word. Um and uh. I feel like relationship with God better describes my, my experience in this world. Um, but yeah, it's always something that I tended to go to after.

Speaker 3:

After the fact, it was something that like, oh no, this is going wrong, like now I need the emergency plan, gotta call God. And it's not like okay, so I'm thinking about this and I'm praying about this and something that I can go to first. And that was something. And that was something that really changed the way that I just walked, like I had a 20 minute walk to work every day and I just prayed. I just prayed on my walk to work and tried to, you know, walk in prayer, tried to live in prayer, like throughout my day.

Speaker 3:

I now see this experience, this human experience. As you know, we're not just in our house or on our walk to work or on vacation, we're living on the biggest altar to God that that exists and we should act as such. Um like this, this earth, this, um the earth that that we walk even you know, in in factories. If you're walking around a factory right now listening to the podcast, that's holy ground and um, cause, all of this earth is holy ground and um, you know, we should, we should use it to worship, uh, the one who gave us this life.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you know, I hear, I hear so many times uh, from people that, um, I remember a conversation, uh, this woman was having with her physical therapist. I just happened to be in a physical therapy room and she was talking about her church and how that Sunday, her pastor preached about how God wants all of them to start their own businesses and, to you know, make a lot of money and to use it to you know, whatever. And like I'm just listening to it, I'm like, all right, this is, this is the prosperity gospel that I've heard about. That is just so wrong, you know, and it's like no, like you know, that is distorting the faith of you know what. What we truly should believe in is that, yeah, god wants what's best for us, but it's not necessarily what we think is best for us.

Speaker 3:

So the second point that you brought up was finding God in more vivid ways or more visual ways in service abroad, and I feel like that was so true.

Speaker 3:

We get caught up in our daily lives here because, you know, we've lived in the United States our whole lives, some of us and it's really frustrating to you know, go go to work, drive the same roads, eat the same food, um, and just be focused on the same things every day, Um, and you can change it if you want.

Speaker 3:

We have, you know, the most amount of opportunity that there appears anywhere in the world and, um, you don't really. I feel like I didn't really take a take a beat to just appreciate what was around me until it wasn't there, and the reliance on God and his blessings, um, and his divine intervention in whatever task it may be big or small was more apparent and my need for him became so much greater because I was praying for my daily bread, because I often didn't know where my next meal was going to come from, where my next meal was going to come from. I feel like there it's so much more apparent, the presence of God, because people still live like they don't know what's going to happen tonight with food, and they don't. It's not like they're just imagining this and they don't. It's not like they're just imagining this. They often don't.

Speaker 2:

It's not like they're staring into the pantry going we don't have anything to eat.

Speaker 3:

We have wheat thins, but I prefer Triscuits and they do pray for their daily bread, which is so encouraging to see that form of life, because we've lost all sense of dependency on God, because we can hold ourselves up. We can now hold ourselves stable and just lock ourselves in and order DoorDash, order Uber Eats and just, you know, not do anything or depend, or if you don't feel called to do something, you don't have to. You really don't have to. You can create everything online, but, as Pastor Rick said this past week in his sermon, unity is so important and, um, that sense of connection is something that doesn't come from. Uh, you know things that you can get just in your, in your room. You need physical contact, you need to be able to have a conversation with someone or have a purpose and, you know, live a purpose-driven life, which kind of, you know, brought me into this kind of walk.

Speaker 2:

So what I hear you saying is that we need God, we need to draw closer to Him. What I hear you saying is that we need others and we need to draw closer to others and be in community. Amen, all right. So let me hit you with some rapid fire questions. We need to draw closer to others and be in community, amen, all right. So let me hit you with some rapid fire questions as we close out this podcast.

Speaker 3:

First question what's the most beautiful thing you saw in Guatemala. Well, this was beautiful for a lot of reasons, but my girlfriend Sophia and I we got the chance to hike Acatenango, which is a volcano that surrounds Antigua, guatemala, and it was so gorgeous. We hiked Acatenango one afternoon, camped there at a base camp and then hiked the rest of the way up to the top at like, starting at like 2 33 in the morning, and I had a parasite and I just pushed through it. I just pushed through it because I was like there's no way I'm missing this, because right across the, you know the skyline, maybe a mile away is, uh, volcán fuego and you can see it erupting.

Speaker 3:

So all night we were watching Fuego erupt and you could see the lava coming out the top and feel it under your feet because the two volcanoes are connected. So in the morning, with the sunrise and the eruptions, it was just gorgeous. That's awesome. A lot of breathtaking.

Speaker 2:

What's the thing you're going to miss most? Uh, after being back, my host family.

Speaker 3:

Um, my host family is just so sweet. Um, my parents got a chance to meet him and I'm so happy they did because they're so, so special. Um, like I would their their family's really big in Totonicapan.

Speaker 3:

It's their, their family's really big in Totonicapan it's it's not the biggest town but they occupy a lot of the citizens there and I would always see someone that's part of my family on the way to work and it was really beautiful because they would, you know, invite me for a coffee or they would invite me for a little treat or whatever they. They don't have much, but they will give whatever they have because they know what it's like to be a foreigner in a foreign place. A lot of them have gone to the United States to make money or to you know.

Speaker 3:

All of them have been out of their normal walk of life and they know what it's like to be a stranger.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you mentioned work. Did you have a job there or was it really connected with the Peace Corps?

Speaker 3:

So that really was my job.

Speaker 3:

The Peace Corps does a really good job at connecting you with host country nationals and someone to support your work and guide you and integrate you into the society or community or wherever you find yourself.

Speaker 3:

So I was actually working with women, like women's empowerment groups to that are focused on teaching them skills on how to create your own business.

Speaker 3:

You know, if God's you know calling them to do that, then we provide the resources to do that, and what I was able to do was create a grant with my work partners and we got 12 laptops, two batteries, wi-fi Internet, microsoft subscriptions and a bunch of other like a huge host of other resources to create a digital literacy course focused on entrepreneurship skills. So they could, with all of the things that they have on paper because a lot of them manage their businesses just on little note cards and little receipts in paper form they can now go to the they call it the Centro de Negocios. They can go to the mine center of business and log all of their data or analyze what's going well, what's not going well, and just be helped by all of the people there that are working with the Ministry of Economy, the Global Network of Indigenous Entrepreneurs. They have a whole host of really good resources. I was so blessed to be a part of that network.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, last question what was the most profound thing God taught you while you were there?

Speaker 3:

I think the biggest thing that God taught me while while in Guatemala was how much I'm dragged down by my own chains, that I have forged myself, own chains that I have forged myself. How many things in my life I don't need but have around me that are just weighing me down from the progress that I seek. I wrote this down before coming to the podcast because I knew this was going to be Really something that might come up, and it's Psalm 50, 17. It says you hate my instruction and cast my words behind you, and I feel like I've heard the word my whole life and I became accustomed to it. I became so used to it and normalized, and it never just dug roots into me until recently.

Speaker 3:

Um, within the past six months, seven months, and uh, then it all became real and I feel like when you have a transformation like that and you realize that there's nothing that you can do on this earth, there's no amount of money, no amount of time, no amount of good that you can do to please god, the only thing left to do is accept his life, and I feel like now, finding this real there's, and not just a collection of stories, not just the things that I heard when I was younger in Sunday school.

Speaker 3:

This kind of love implores, it demands a change of life. It demands a change of self Because if you really love something or someone, your person is going to change, your character, your way of being. There's going to be sacrifice. There's going to be massive sacrifices that you're going to have to make, and I feel like the sacrifices that I'm going to be making in my life are going to scare a lot of people, including my mom and dad, because they just want the best for me. But I'm not going to be taking an orthodox route after the Peace Corps here. I feel like this is now not my life. This is God's life, to do what he wants with it. These are not my wants anymore. This is God. This is now God working through me.

Speaker 2:

Knowing your parents, I think they'll be okay with that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, they just want the best and God bless them. They put up with a lot with my sister and I, but this is, you know, getting back to Psalm 50, 17. This is, I feel, like me being called to not cast his word aside and hate his instruction and hate is a strong word here, but it's just to, you know, create contrast. You're supposed to hate your life because of how much you love God and I feel like I've really liked my life. It's comfortable, I need for nothing, I don't pray for my daily bread, but now, seeing that in Guatemala and that need um and his presence, the Holy spirit flowing through me, it's demanding a true change and I feel like that's what, uh, God has has really called um into my heart over the past couple of years.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. It clearly is something that is deeply rooted into your soul and still fresh for you. So thanks for sharing your heart and your passion and your experience. You mentioned silence earlier in this episode. How did you begin the practice of silence, the discipline of silence, in your life?

Speaker 3:

So getting started with silence wasn't easy. I feel like there was a division of who I was and who I wanted to be as a more contemplative or intentional person, and that wouldn't come without a true change. Like I said before, and I think silence was a way into that, there's so many things distracting and with a new life in Guatemala, I feel like there was always something to keep me busy and distracted from that change that I wanted to have happen within me. So it's just intentionally like starting with five minutes a night, starting with five minutes and you know, not really having maybe having an intention, maybe not having an intention, but just doing it every night and making it a part of my day before going to bed. And then that grew into 10 minutes and then that grew into 20 minutes and, um, as the the longer I did it, the less time it seemed like I was doing it because I had so much to get off my mind that I was just holding back.

Speaker 3:

I feel like there was a division between who I was and what I gave to God and what I held back from God. I said that my life was for him, but did I give everything to him or just the things that I was comfortable with giving to him. Um, so, completely being transparent with God was really freeing, and that only came through silence. So, uh, that was a completely necessary practice for me.

Speaker 2:

Um so, christian, I really appreciate you giving of your time, um, I appreciate you sharing your story and all that you've learned, and I hope that that will benefit our listeners. And if you are out there listening to this, thank you for listening. And don't forget to like and subscribe and all those good things that you do with podcasts and check us out next week as we bring you something just as, if not more, exciting, to the podcast world, and check our show notes for anything that we talked about, referenced, highlighted, for some more details. See you next week.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for being a part of the Hope Community as we continue our conversations about faith and hope. If you don't already, please join us for worship on Sundays or on demand. You can learn more at meethopeorg or find us on socials at meethopechurch.