Even the Stork in the Sky knows her Seasons: Leaving San Carlos

Well we’re leaving San Carlos tonight at 10pm for 6 hour bus ride to the coastal town of “Y-Eki”, we were originally supposed to go to Santa Domingo but due to some miscommunications between members of the church leadership there was a last minute change of plans. These last two weeks with this church have flown by but if there was one thing I was worried about it’s that we didn’t do enough. I mean we completed their schedule they made for us and we did a bunch of different stuff but I’d say compared to the previous churches we’ve partnered with we “worked” the least here.

The wild part is that out of all the churches we’ve worked with, this church has been the most grateful to us. I just got back from an invitation the pastors extended to us for a time of blessing for the team. The pastors told us that they we so satisfied with the work we’d done, that they love us and that everyone on the team is invited to come back to Quito at any point and stay with them. Our host family was also in tears yesterday when they were talking about what a blessing our team has been in their house and how much they’re going to miss us. This is by far the warmest we’ve been received yet and I’m going to miss San Carlos a lot.

Here’s a new one to change topics: So being that’s its my last day in Quito I take a walk to this park I’ve been doing quiet times in for the last two weeks and as I’m writing a journal entry this dude, early 30s, walks up to me and tries to sell me some Chervichochos (the same thing I was hawking last week in the farmers market. I tell him I’m not interested because I’ve been sick for the last three days (throwing up and only eating apples and cereal). He then begins asking me a bunch of questions:

Am I from Colombia? No. I’m from the United States doing missionary work.

Can you tell me more? Sure, and I explain to him what YWAM is and tell him a little about how the outreach has been.

Are there guys and girls in the team? Yes.

Are you single or married? I’m single

Do you have a big penis? Wait… What!?!

Yep, that one came out of nowhere. At first I just thought that I didn’t understand this guy’s question but no, he restated it very bluntly with some hand gestures that couldn’t be misinterpreted. To answer him I just kind of changed the subject and told him that for this time I was spending as a missionary God wanted me to focus solely on Him and that I wasn’t going to pursue any relationships in this time (I hadn’t really put the pieces together that this dude was coming on to me). He started to back away from me to leave but I asked him if I could pray for him for anything and invited him to sit next to me on the bench. He told me some prayer requests and I prayed in English and then afterwards summarized what I prayed for him in Spanish. I told him that I prayed that God would open the door to his heart for a deeper relationship with Him. All misty eyes this guy, David, thanked me for the prayer and then booked it out of there. It wasn’t until after he left that I realized he’d been hitting on me.

I was thinking about this interaction on my walk home from the park when I ran into Christina (the girl from the blog entry last week I had a super encouraging conversation with) and I got to tell her about the little “testimony” that had just happened. I was reminded that I’d told her last week that God only seems to give me exactly the amount of Spanish I need and never more than I need. I think had I been totally fluent in Spanish I wouldn’t have treated that guy so warmly and been so enthusiastic to pray for him. Christina agree and then told me that she believe I would be fluent in Spanish someday.