Even the Stork in the Sky knows her Seasons: Treking in a wilderness all of my own.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gone 4 months without reading a novel and the only book I have is the Bible but for some reason I’ve just wanted to read the Bible all the way through whenever there’s free time in-between the day’s events. This habit I’ve gotten into paid off this week when I was having a particularly bad day. I’ve been going back and forth with my confidence in the Spanish language; some days I feel like I’m understanding most everything and I’m able to say exactly what I need to say to people and other days I’m just discouraged and lost. I was experiencing one of the latter days and it didn’t help that I was coming off only 6 hours of sleep because we all needed to wake up earlier to participate in a fundraiser for the youth group. While we were preparing the food we were going to be selling in a street market I sliced open the web of my hand in between the thumb and pointer finger I didn’t have the word for “band-aid”.

After the fundraiser (which I actually did really well at) we needed to pack over a dozen people inside the pastor’s car to get a ride to house because he wanted to serve us lunch. I was crammed in the back on top of someone’s lap with my head having to rest on the passenger seat because I couldn’t sit up strait. It was pretty uncomfortable position to stay in for over an hour and when we finally got to the pastor’s house I was desperate to get out of the car. After lunch everyone went to a park to play basketball but I opted to lay under a tree in the shade. I cracked open my Bible and started reading through Exodus, and I happened to be at the part where the Israelites are complaining to Moses a few weeks after the Red Sea was parted and they all walked through while Pharaoh and his army was swept away behind them.

Exodus 16:2-3
“And the whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And the sons of Israel said to them, “Would that he had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

Now I’ve read this in the past and I’ve always thought that the Israelites were so worthless and annoying, I mean seriously, six weeks ago you were walking through the Red Sea and now you don’t think the Lord can provide you with some bread. But reading these chapters again, underneath a tree in a park in Quito this week, I empathized with them a lot more because I felt a lot like them. God has been so faithful with me on this outreach, I’ve been so blessed and yet I still get discouraged with the language all the time and think I’ll never learn it. How easily do we forget our testimonies when times get hard? How easily can our faith get de-railed?

The Lord’s been convicting me that I need to trust Him more and not get so easily discouraged when it comes to things that He’s constantly proven faithful in when I’ve needed. Even though I never really feel like I ever have more Spanish than I need, I do feel like when I really need it its there and I’m getting better and better. I’ve been telling myself every time that I begin to get confused in the middle of a conversation to just have faith; since I’ve adopted this strategy things have been better and I’ve felt less discouraged.

The church were partnered with until the 16th of May is easily the more organized church we’ve worked with on the outreach and they were kind enough to schedule us a free-day. A group of 4 of us went to the movies with one of the girls from the church that’s our age and we ended up watching (the only movie that was in English w/ Spanish subtitles) “Hall Pass” with Owen Wilson. After the movie I’d had enough of the mall and so had Christiana (the girl from the church) and while the other shopped around we decided to opt out of taking the bus and walk the 40 minute road back to our houses. On the way we were talking in Spanish about the movie and I was surprised by how the movie made me feel. The plot is that these two wives give their husband a week long “hall-pass” where they’re free to act like they’re not married and try to hook up with whoever they want (it started out funny but I’d give it a C). Anyways, after I began talking about the movie I was surprised how upset it had made me. Before the DTS I might have just been bummed I’d wasted money seeing a lame movie but now I was upset at how trivial the institution of marriage was being portrayed. I definitely had to laugh a myself a little but I was really impressed at how when we’re walking close with God He can use anything (worldly or not) to teach us the lesson He wants to. That the women I marry someday can’t just “be a Christian” but she has needed to be a rock-solid Christian like some of the girls I’m doing this DTS with; that has to be the most important first thing I look for because I don’t want to end up like any of the guys in the movie I saw and I definitely don’t want my future wife acting like any of the women.

So after chatting about the movie Christiana asked me why I’d decided to move to south America to be a missionary and I told her that that it was kind of a long story and that it would be tough for me to explain it all in Spanish. But then she told me that she speaks English because she did some missionary thing in England a year earlier! So after I told her the testimony that got me to south America and some of the things I’d been learning recently this girl blows me away with how well she can she not only understand English but speak it as well. She had so many key words of encouragement for me that I was convinced God wanted us to walk home together. She told me that she felt exactly the same way I did when she trying to live in England without being able to speak English and how the program that she was in ended up being in all English instead of Spanish and yet she said that it was a miracle that she understood the main points of everything anyway because she knew God wanted her to be there. She also told me that when she looks back on her life now it’s separated in two parts: before being a missionary/ after being a missionary and she’s a walking testimony as a solid English speaker. Seriously though, what are the odds that the first Ecuadorian I meet on the outreach that can speak English basically did the exact same thing I’m doing and could encourage me that I’ve been making all the right choices up until this point… in English!

Yeah, it rains when you’re in the back of trucks too.

Lot’s of practical work this week and not as much evangelism. We spent two days at this senior citizen home landscaping.

This lady was definitely my favorite person at the nursing home and I practiced speaking Spanish to her for almost 45 minutes. It was easy to talk to her because every 10 minutes she’d kind of forget what we’d been talking about so she would repeat herself a lot and anything that I didn’t catch the first time I’d get on the third or forth time around.

We also did a fundraiser for the youth group where we went to a farmer’s market to buy (almost) all the ingredients for a snack that we sold at an outdoor market. The snack would have been delicious and healthy white bean salsa fresca combination but then (in true Latin American style the final ingredient was 4 liters of orange soda!

Even though I don’t speak fluent Spanish I killed at selling the chocolos. On the advice of a friend I used an accent the whole time I was shouting and believe me we attracted a lot of attention; in fact I think we sold out.

All the guys prayers were answered this week when a group of guys from the last church were we working with invited us to a futbol game! Junior, Jose, and I had to go out and buy Liga jerseys for the event and we had a blast (even though they lost 0-2).