- December 14, 2025
As Dan Douglas stood on a hillside, building a 15-by-20 one-room home, he caught a glimpse of a woman cooking down below. Her old, beat up pot rested on top of a stick fire, which was propped up by a pile of rocks.
As the lady stirred her pot, with a broken wooden spoon, Douglas was reminded of his kitchen back home, full of pots and pans.
“Something she was using I would throw away,” he reflected.
Douglas was part of an eight-person Go Guatemala mission team, in Guatemala, from Palm Coasts’ Epic Church.
The house the team was building was located just outside Antigua, in one of the poorest areas, Pastores.
The house had cement floors, metal walls and roof. There was no running water, bathroom, kitchen or air conditioning. The sole source of power was one outlet, which ran into the house on what looked like a lamp cord, Douglas remembered.
“But when you looked around at the houses that were next to it, scattered throughout the hillside, this was a luxurious home,” Douglas said. “Most of the houses had no windows, no doors, walls made out of blankets, corn stalks and tarps — anything else they could find.”
Douglas was joined on the trip by Scott and Christian Smith, Jenna Keeney, Stacy Lemmon, Trish Fleenor, Trinity Weinel and Tim Jones.
“As Epic, we look for certain churches in other countries that share the same values, share the same heartbeat,” said Jones, spiritual development leader at Epic Church. “We have a partnership that we started to scout out last year with Iglesia del Camino.”
Iglesia del Camino, a ministry-based church in Antigua, hosted the Epic missions team.
In addition to building, missionaries fed homeless, inside the church.
“They want them to know that it’s OK for them to be there,” Lemmon said. “Whether they’re dirty, they’re drunk, they’re high. Whether they’re a believer or nonbeliever.”
As Lemmon spooned soup into cups, she looked around the room and was struck with how blessed she is and how that is forgotten too often, she said.
“My biggest takeaway was that I want to be more involved here in our community with those that are needy and homeless,” Lemmon said.
As the week of serving drew to a close, the eight team members gathered a bucket full of essentials as housewarming gifts for the two homes built.
When they arrived at the first home, the team members were surprised to see it empty. They were even more surprised to learn that, 12 hours earlier, the mother of the youngest two children in the house had died.
“In the midst of their pain, we were able to bring this gift to them. And they got super excited,” Jones said.
And then the grandmother, through an interpreter, told the team that her daughter had peace dying because she knew that a house was just built for her kids and for her mother to live in.
“I knew I was coming to Guatemala to build these homes for these needy families, and I knew I was coming to teach God’s word,” Douglas said. “But the one thing I didn’t expect was that God was going to use these people to teach me.”
