homeward bound

Wow, its been a while since I've updated, life has been kinda busy lately. I'll be heading home for about three weeks on Monday, so I probably won't be updating during that time, so this is the last time I'll be writing for a while. I've been doing really well with not being homesick, I miss everyone back home, but it was manageable. But now that I know that I'm leaving in a couple days, time seems to be dragging sooo slowly, and I'm definitely getting homesick. As much as I love the 70-80 degree days here, I want/need to go home and see family and friends.
For about the past two weeks, I've been spending a lot of time at David and Leah's house making one room into three rooms. The walls are up, and have one layer of mud on the drywall. The rest will have to wait until January.
On Thursday night, we celebrated Christmas with a family that works at the dump. They are such an amazing family, I don't know how they do everything they do. If you want to know more about his family ask me about hem when I'm back and I would love to tell you what of their story I know. Very briefly: the grandma has raised all of the kids, and I believe there's 8 kids from 18 years to 6 months. Reyna is the grandma's name, and she played cards for the first time in her life at the party. I'm so glad I got to be a part of it.
Well, there's one last thing that's going on tonight before I go home. We're going to go finish up cleaning the park that we started at the amo mi ciudad event two weeks ago. I'm excited to see what it looks like when its finished.
I think that's about all for now, hopefully I will see all/most of you when I'm home. I'd love to tell you about all the things that have been happening here that I just don't have time to write about. Thank you all for your prayers!

An amazing week!

Wow, I have a lot to talk about! This last week was awesome! The team from my church was down here and we all had a blast! God did so much in such a short amount of time; I am so amazed at how good He is. He knew what each of us needed this week, and we all got it.

We started what seemed too early on Monday morning at 9:30, had some food and such, and had some worship time that was awesome! Then Kathy gave a teaching on corporate prayer. (I was super excited when I found out we were going to be learning about corporate prayer; that was one thing that I really wanted to be at Valleybrook for to learn about.) The plans we had for that day, (as well as a couple of other days) didn’t really happen, but God took that and blew our minds. We didn’t end up getting done with our devotional until like 4 pm or something, and then we went to the plaza, which is basically like the town hall, and we all spend some time doing prayer walks. I got to talk (in very broken Spanish) to a number of students for like an hour or so. I was so exhausted afterwards, but pumped at the same time!

Tuesday we started a little earlier and had another prayer walk downtown before lunch. Then after lunch we got to bless a kindergarten school with building some shelves, weeding a flower garden that was very out of hand, pulling vines off of a fence, taking down a chalkboard that they had been using as a bulletin board and put up some actual bulletin boards, and scraping a ceiling that had a ton of peeling paint. It looked amazing when we left!Wednesday we learned a lot more about prayer and finished up at the school and then finished off the night with going to the coffee shop that we’re going to be opening in February.

Thursday was kind of the culmination of all that we had learned about prayer. We really were challenged to put into practice what we had learned. We spent about an hour handing out coffee and cookies to people in the market and then asking if they needed prayer about anything. Everyone on the team has a story to tell about what God showed them through the market ministry and the week as a whole, but that’s Friday. :) After lunch some of us went to the school to finish/re-scrape the ceiling at the school. Kudos to them, I know some of them didn’t want to but they did it with out complaining. The rest of us went to the base and painted some barrels for the recycling program we’re starting. Then as we were leaving I hit a car with the van. :( But God is good; it was all taken car of in a matter of hours. Apparently I am an official YWAMer now that I’ve hit something.:)

Now for Friday, which was awesome! We were planning on going to the beach, but it ended up being cold and rainy so what did we do instead? We worshipped and talked about what God did in each of us throughout the week. Boring huh? NOT! Six hours flew by and by the time we finished at 5 (without even eating lunch I might add) God had brought a ton of healing into the room we were in. I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to explain what He did that day but it can really only be felt; it’s very unexplainable. By the end of the day we were oddly enough thanking God for the crappy weather which forced us to stay and allow what needed to happen to happen.

Then Saturday after the team packed and such we had the “Amo Mi Ciudad” event (I love my city). For three hours about 80 volunteers painted curbs, cut weeds, swept the streets, picked up garbage, and probably a lot of other things I can’t remember right now. Then we all met at the park downtown and had a concert. What was cool about it was the fact that we could play Christian songs (even some worship songs) in English and even the people who weren’t Christians liked the music without knowing what it was.:)

One more thing that was really cool about each day was that it seemed like I needed to go somewhere each morning and every time I thought I would miss the teaching, but somehow I would always get back just as it was getting started. It was a really cool thing to look back on; I was able to run all the errands, but also didn’t miss out on anything I was supposed to hear.

God did so much in all of us: team, staff, volunteers, and everyone else that there’s a ton that happened that I don’t even know about. At the start of the week, I was looking at the schedule and all of the stuff that needed to get done each day, and I felt super overwhelmed. But God did everything that needed to get done each day and everything went so smoothly that there are times that I think back on all the we did, and think “How the heck did we do all of that in six days without dying out of utter exhaustion?” But I always realize right after thinking that God knew what was going to happen that week and He knew what we all needed to see and hear. And obviously He made sure everything happened just as it needed to.:)

Some big things

Well, I've been here for over a week now, and I'm still super excited to be here, I miss home and my community there obviously, but I can totally see why God has me here right now at this point in my life. There is so much going on here that I'm so excited to be a part of. First of all, there's a worship night tomorrow night (Saturday) for all of the youth in the churches. I'm really excited about that, and you can be praying that God would speak to the students that come.
Another thing that I'm excited about is a recycling program that we're trying to start. There is no recycling center here, and so plastic bottles just get thrown away in the trash, and there's a lot of money to be made that can be put back into the community if people would just recycle instead of throwing everything in the trash. First of all, It will help clean the town up, and second it will make money to fix up parks and such. There are many parks with non-functioning playground equipment, just because no one maintains it so it all gets run-down.
A third thing that I'm excited about many of you already know about and that is the Our City event that's coming up here at the end of November. We've been preparing for that and its really getting me fired up. This city is like right on the brink of change, and it just needs a couple of pushes to get it over and I think this is definitely a way that God can show the people of this town what love really looks like when its lived out.
One last thing that I'm excited about that's kind of a ways off in the future is a dream that the staff here has had for a while that is starting to come true. We want to open a coffee shop here in town, and we have a location now, and an opening date (approximately), and God is really opening doors for us that we weren't sure He would open. It is really cool how much has come together in even just the week that I've been here. The plan is to start paying rent in the middle of January, and open the first of February once everything has been fixed up to our liking and such. So we're all super pumped about what God is going to do in the next two months.

The First few days

I’m in Mexico!! My trip down was good but long, I was travelling for about 22 hours total including bus and taxi rides. Communication with non-english speaking people was kind of hard, but I realized it is something that God has been preparing me for in the last few months with communicating with my sister Brihan.

I am staying with a really awesome couple down here named Dan and Wendy, and life down here is great. There are a lot of things that I’m going to have to get used to, but I’m trusting that God will help me get through it all. I’ve already met quite a few people here, and so far including Dan and Wendy only like five people speak English, but I can usually understand about 60 percent of what all is being said if I really concentrate on the conversation. I never realized how much work it takes just to comprehend Spanish conversations. I’m kind of hesitant to speak Spanish right now, just because it would be very broken, but I need to get over that. :)

Dan and I spent about a day and a half taking out an old mango tree stump (which is super hard wood by the way), fixed a pipe (that I accidently broke), and planted a new tree in place of the old one. The food here is so far amazing! We went out for tacos the night I got here, and Wendy is an amazing cook.

I’m amazed at how everything looks, from the buildings, to the trees to the plants, and even just the way the downtown is set up. The night life here is cool, most restaurants don’t open until like 7 or 8 at night, and then they’re open til like 3 in the morning.

It’s a very lively place and fun to be, but kind of overwhelming at first. Tonight we went to a birthday party for one of the local pastors, and it was crazy. The music was as loud as it could be and there was a ton going on. One thing that was really cool was that they sang the songs hosanna, and sing sing sing, so I could sing along in english. I guess I wasn't expecting to recognize any worship songs so knowing what was being sung was really exciting.

The more time I spend in this city, I'm amazed at the ways God is showing up here. He is really moving in a lot of the people, and the YWAM staff here are absolutely amazing. Well, I think I'm going to head to bed now, I hope to write again soon!