Counseling. Solamente en Espanol.

Saturday April 30th I had a chance to Skype my parents for the first time in about a month and a half and we had a nice hour and a half conversation. One of the things we talked about was the counseling school that I’m going to be taking after this DTS and how I’m nervous that because of my developing Spanish and challenges with comprehension that maybe I’m setting myself up for failure but then God gave me three counseling testimonies in about 36 hours.

The first needs a little history. One of our outreaches last week was at a high school named Swiss School and I thought the outreach went really well, that was until I heard the next day that the night after we presented one of the students named Andres tried to commit suicide. He drank a bunch of poison and was in critical condition at the same hospital we had visited in Quito a month earlier. We went to visit him even though he was in a comma and the doctors told us that they didn’t think he was going to make it and so everyone in the team prayed for him individually because only one person was allowed in a time. I went in second and when I was praying for him I felt like the Holy Spirit was telling me to tell him to open his eyes so I said out loud “Andres, open your eyes!” The moment after the words came out of my mouth he started coughing and began to get up and I was thinking “Oh $#*&, I’m experiencing a miracle” but he just rolled over and kept sleeping. However the doctors told me that it was a hopeful sign and as every person on the team prayed for him he kept showing positive signs of life; he even opened his eyes for a moment. His family was really encouraged and to spare you the drama 2 days later he came out of a comma and physically going to be fine, the doctors are stoked.

Our connection at Swiss School was Andres’ 17 year old brother Isaac and after the suicide attempt we’d invited him to be part of our team and to participate just like he was a member to encourage him and to help him focus on God and not stress about his brother alone. I was scheduled to preach the day before his brother would come out of a comma and after preparing my message (with Isaac’s situation being my main source of inspiration) our time schedule went long and they cancelled my message. I was praying about this and I felt like I needed to give it just to Isaac because without mentioning his brother’s name or his situation the message was inspired by him. And after lunch while we were waiting for our ride back to the church I had the perfect half hour window to talk to him alone. I hit him with a pretty difficult verse for his situation but I really felt like the Lord needed him to hear it.

Philippians 4:4-7
“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving; present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

I got to share with him that I had an idea of how he was feeling because someone very close to me had attempted suicide and how God was in the mix and faithful in that situation. I told him that in so many times in this DTS I’d been discouraged and sad and that I couldn’t forget to: Rejoice always, and remember my testimonies. I went on to tell him that it wasn’t by chance that he was with us in this time and that I believed that his brother was going to come out of the comma and that he was going to have to love on him big time when he did. It was pretty awesome, and I knew that Isaac understood my broken Spanish because he was in tears the whole time and he told me after that he could feel the Holy Spirit when I was talking to him. And Boom, The next day his brother came out of comma.

That evening after our morning evangelism with Isaac we had free time and when I returned from the internet café with a bootlegged 1.50 copy of True Grit on DVD I only found Francesca at the church. We’d arrived at the same time from different internet cafés to discover the rest of the team hadn’t waited for us to go take the hour and a half bus into Quito to browse around the malls. After Francesca and I watch my movie it was only 8PM so we decided to walk 45 minutes to downtown Calderon to buy a snack since neither of us had eaten dinner; on the way I had another legitimate counseling session. One of the reasons I believe that God brought me to South America for this DTS where I don’t speak the language to help me not get involved in any boy/girl drama that it bound to spring up when there is a joke about YWAM, that it really stands for: Yes We Arrange Marriages. Poor Francesca we stuck right in the middle of it.

17 year old Francesca had begun her DTS in the middle of a 3 year relationship with our 21 year old leader Jared, but after praying about it she made the difficult choice to put the relationship on hold at least until the DTS was over. She didn’t want the relationship to cloud what God was trying to teach but what I’m sure she wasn’t expecting was for her best friend in the school of fall for Jared and for the two begin spending all of their free time together. It was really nice to just talk her through all of feeling and listen to her get everything off her chest since she was feeling like she didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. Now I can’t say that I understood every single word but I definitely got most of it and just like Isaac I know that you don’t cry if you don’t understand the words of encouragement someone is giving you. It really strengthened my faith that I was able to talk to this girl and share with her for over an hour and half just speaking Spanish. I was also super impressed when she told me that she isn’t going to leave the DTS because of this and that she knows that God is teaching her something through this experience and that if Jared is supposed to marry someone else she’s happy for him because she wants what God wants for him more than anything. Dang, when I think about it this is the more mature 17 year-old I’ve ever met!

While the previous example was more about the value of being a good listener what happened in our last night in Calderon was an example when I had to take charge, in Spanish. The leadership of the church want to treat us to what I was told was supposed to be a “relaxing day”. Unfortunately however, despite their best efforts, the day was extremely stressful. First, we're woken up at 6:45AM because they’d planned to pack in so much “fun” and so many people from the church who liked us were invited that we found ourselves cramming 20 people into 1 truck and 2 cars and spending more time driving to different locations (and getting lost and having to stop and wait for everyone to find each other before continuing) that we never had much time to enjoy the places we were going to. We got some good photo opts but when we finally got back to the church at 5:45 and I was told that the going-away (3 and a half hour) church service was starting in 15 minutes and that I needed to shower and play harmonica on the worship team you can bet I wasn’t super enthusiastic. We didn’t know it was going to go so long but the service went from 6:20 to 9:50 (with worship, message, dance and music presentation from partnered churches, testimonies and then 4 our dramas) then afterwards everything still wanted to chat us up and take pictures until after 11:00pm. So you can bet that after a super long day like this (and knowing that I’ll be needing to pack up all my stuff in the morning because I’d be moving to San Carlos for the next 2 week stint of the outreach) the last thing I wanted to do was evangelize to a drunk that had fallen asleep on the sidewalk right in front of the church.

But that was God’s plan for me last night. He’d passed out cold right in front of the church and before I went for my nightly 2 mile walk up and down the block to reflect on the day, listen to some music and get ready for bed I asked him if he wanted me to call him a taxi or something but he just shooed me away. When I’d come back from my walk and as I was saying goodbye to the last of the people who were finally exiting the church so I could sleep this drunk guy stumbles into the sanctuary and all he wants to do is talk to me. Oh man God, seriously, I’m tired and this guys can barely walk let alone understand my Spanish. The leader and I escort him away from all the children still in the church and back to the sidewalk where we try to talk to him. He tells us that his Dad was a missionary and that he’s a Christian. We pray for him and I catch myself saying something like “We believe that everyone that crosses our path on this outreach meets us for a reason and that we’re not going to take a break from being Christians just because we’re tired”. He kept trying to quote the Great Commission to us for some reason and eventually after everyone got sick of talking to him because he just kept talking and refusing to listen to us I told him that I was going to walk him to his house because he was to drunk to get home safely alone. I get him all to way to his house and he unlocks the door and then he keeps inviting me inside to read his Bible and sing worship songs. Now there was no way I was going into this dude’s super shady looking house by myself and I told him that we both needed sleep and that if he wanted I’m read the Bible with him in the morning if he was sober and came back to the church, we parted way and when I got back to the church I started getting ready for bed.

I’m brushing my teeth now, I think it had to have been almost 2 in the morning and who started knocking on the church door? You guessed it, Jorge the drunk, and now he has his Bible with him and he wants me to read it to him. We talk through the fence in the church and I basically said “Look dude, I walked you all the way home, I’m tired and I don’t have time to read the Bible to you because I have a long day of moving tomorrow, come by in the morning and we’ll pick up where we left off”. But then he said “Where in the Bible does it say that God doesn’t ‘have time’ for us?” Now for some reason when he said this to me I felt totally convicted, I put down my toothbrush and was like “Alright man, you brought your Bible and now you want to read it? What the plan, do you want to sit outside on the curb and read you Bible until the sun comes up? He looks at me and says “Si!” “Bueno, Vamos!” I reply and when I ask him where he wants to start, sure enough, he says The Great Commission. I read him all of Matthew Chapter 28 and then just start preaching to him in Spanish. I told him that this is my “ends of the earth” and that he was my testimony and that God was reaching out to him through me and through our team. Afterwards he asks me to pray for him and I knock out my longest Spanish prayer to date and when I open my eyes he’s crying.

After these three testimonies I’m re-encouraged to start the counseling school. I’ve seen it time and time again that the Holy Spirit doesn’t need me to be a fluent Spanish speak to use me and that as I just continue to put God first in everything and recognize how much I need him he continues to be faithful. The quiet time verse I got the morning before this super long and stressful day was this:

1st Thessalonians 2:3-4
“For the appeal we make does not spring from error or impure motives, nor are we trying to trick you. On the contrary, we speak as men approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. We are not trying to please men, but God, who tests our hearts.

The view from a boat trip we were taken on.

This is Isaac

This is an incredibly beautiful park we were taken too, it was huge and if we’d had more time I would have loved to walk the trails all day unfortunately we only had about an hour here.

But we did have enough time to snap some cool photos

The crew, leaving the nature preserve.

One more going away photo. Its weird making friends with an entire church and then leaving 2 weeks later (again and again). However if I ever return to Ecuador I have million invitations of place I can stay for free.