The first week at the dumps is now complete, rounded off
nicely with a beautiful worship service this morning in the same school
building we serve in Monday through Friday. I was absolutely bursting with joy as we sang, in English, with a couple
hundred small children. We rocked along with
the guitar and drums and shouted out mostly internationally popular praise
songs, such as “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord,” with high energy and hands
raised. These kids are hungry for God. And now with a lazy Sunday afternoon, and happy
knowledge of UNC’s latest football victory over Notre Dame, I guess it’s time
to give you a little more details of exactly what we have been doing the past
seven days.
Before I
even begin with our service projects, I think a word on our living arrangements
is in order. There are 13 of us between
Team Libre and Team Judah here on this side of Manila, and we are all in one small room. It looks like an army barracks with all bunk
beds and a narrow aisle in-between not necessarily designed for two-way
traffic. Throw in all the big packs that
are holding everything we own for the next 11 months – whose contents are
becoming less and less packed and more and more strewn about in chaos – and
you’ve got a cozy little room to say the least. Cozier still, though is the single bathroom we share in our room. 13 people – 10 girls – one shower, one
toilet, one sink. Okay, so it’s not
exactly that bad b/c we do have open access to the other few bathrooms one
story below, but you get the idea. This
is community living.
And now
that I’ve painted the picture of how much we’re really struggling and
sacrificing for the Lord, I can move on to the truth about the greatness of
this place. We’re on the fifth story
with a nice view and a quaint little terrace. Every night, we enjoy Filipino sunsets over the balcony. There is a television, with a DVD player and
HBO, so we’ve been able to enjoy a couple movies. We have a kitchen where we take turns cooking
dinner each night, and we have free wireless internet connection so we can
constantly communicate with you back home and the rest of the world. A few blocks away there is a big mall, where
we celebrated a couple teammates’ birthdays last night at T.G.I.-Fridays. I haven’t taken advantage of these yet, but
the mall also has a bowling alley and movie theatre among a plethora of stores
like you would find at any other mall. Don’t pity us.
Now for
assignments inside the school in the dumps. We spent several days doing two main service projects that were given to
us. One group has been creating a
library – sorting through thousands of donated books and boxes, cleaning out
trash, organizing and creating a typed list of all the books. Three teammates and I have been cleaning out
a store room. When we started, we could
barely step inside the door of this room with all the junk piled haphazardly
within. When it rains, the school
floods. So anything that was in a
cardboard box (about half the stuff) has been water damaged and partially
destroyed. This has created the perfect
nesting ground for “critters.”
Along with
the all the cockroaches, we saw plenty of other things as well. Every once in a while we would see a small
lizard shoot across the wall. One day
there was a huge spider that stretched as long as the height of the shoebox
upon which it was trying to lay eggs. And then came the rats. A couple
comparatively small ones emerged from the boxes at first. But one afternoon Steph and I saw the
granddaddy of them all. A rat, let’s calls
him Splinter, came up from behind one of the last remaining boxes and casually
walked up the wall and out the window. This
time I couldn’t even make any noise or move to kill it or shoo it away. I stared in literal disbelief and just
watched until it disappeared. I really
don’t even know how to describe it; I’ve never seen anything like it. If it were in my hands, its belly would have spilled
over in every direction, and its tail would run halfway down my forearm. This creature was an absolute freak of
nature, that’s all there is to it.
I think
many people’s lives are just like this storage room. We let things pile up until they become an
absolute mess. And we hide our sins and
flaws in darkness, where they grow and mutate. We have to start cleaning out our “storage closets.” The further along in our assignment we got,
the brighter the room became. We
eliminated shadows and hiding places and exposed the cockroaches (sin) to
light. It was a long, tedious
process. It’s not pleasant and it might
even hurt. Just ask all the roaches that
went “crunch.” Finally, each new box we
went through would send dozens more cockroaches scurrying about the room. And we would crush them. Funny thing is, the more boxes we cleared
out, the more critters we knew would be waiting for us in the remaining
ones. If we didn’t kill them the first
time, they headed for the dark hiding spots that remained. You can’t just stop halfway because if you do
you’ve just moved the bad junk from one place to another and not really
eliminated it. You have to finish the
work you started and clean it all out. This
post has already run way long, but just know that as this year progresses I
hope to be completely honest and vulnerable with you as you follow and support
me. I encourage you to start cleaning
out any cockroaches or cobwebs you may have in your heart and I will do the
same.
P.S…. The task seems tough at first, but you have no idea
how fun it can be. Ever played
whack-a-roach?
~LOVE~
