This month has been amazing, wonderful, has taught me a LOT, and my faith has grown a ton being here in the Philippines. But it’s probably not what you would expect. This month in a lot of ways has actually been my least favorite month so far on the world race. The ministry here has been one of my least favorite this year and I have found myself everyday doing the opposite of what I had wanted or planned to do. Let me try to paint a better picture of this month for you and what has been happening with ministry and with different situations…
One of my most favorite parts of this month was canceled week one (long story) so we were not allowed to go back to the prison anymore. Many of my days here were spent doing a lot of manual labor in the sun, which many days you just want to throw up because the heat is unbearable. I have spent countless hours picking up rocks, weeding a huge field, dragging bags of gravel over to make a path, planting then re-planting the right grass after finding out 4 hours later it was the wrong one, taking care of very sick kids, organizing a huge linen closet full of more sheets then I could ever count, and mopping and cleaning toilets. I have spent most of this month sick because almost every child here at this orphanage is sick with runny noses, sneezing, fevers etc. Not just me but about 25 out of the 31 of us got sick…a few ending up and still in the hospital now. Some people have been so sick they have barely gotten out of bed this month. The water truck broke down so we don’t have any way to get water up to us in the mountains. So instead we put out buckets to catch rain water…this means being VERY sparing with the water, using very little water to bathe with, trying not to bathe frequently, and letting the bathroom smell pretty bad before ever flushing the toilet. There were not enough beds for everyone so I have a bed on the ground this month. Which is fine except it is probably the dirtiest bed I have ever slept in, in my whole life! The amount of dirt and bugs I push out of it each night before I go to sleep is enough to make any of you cringe and wonder how in the world I am making it lol J It’s not anyone’s fault really but they have to step on my bed to get to their beds, my friend just realized the other day when she pushes the bugs out of her bed she actually is pushing them onto mine, and I am closest to the door and on the floor thus more bugs! So on average I usually need to remove 15-20 bugs from my sheets and pillow case before I can sleep…lol and the funny thing is this is my life, I don’t even find it that strange anymore! The showers this month are by far the coldest that I have even had on the world race and I use one small little cup to bathe and wonder between screaming at the temperature and the little cup how clean I really am getting in there haha! And you really do need to shower off because here is the other thing about our site, I almost wipe out in mud every time I walk ANYWHERE! Because guess what, it rains a lot in the Philippines usually at the most inopportune times too of course J The flies here are absolutely the most insane I have ever seen around the world. I once counted 14 flies on my friend Natalie I sleep next to while she took a nap…I just stood starring at this thinking where am I right now haha? I live with 12 other girls in a small room, our things are everywhere, getting lost 24/7, our room is filthy all the time no matter how much we sweep because there is just first every where and it travels into our room. Oh and one of my favorite parts (if you know me you know I am KIDDING COMPLETELY) is the wasps nest that is somewhere in our room we cant find it…so we have to scream and the boys come running down to kill these wasps that are very angry they are stuck in our room. The snakes and HUGE bugs here in the Philippines are some of the strangest and biggest I have ever seen, even weirder then Africa! There is never an ounce of privacy living with 12 other girls meaning its extrememely hard to ever find a moment of just pure silence. Not to mention with everyone sick and laying in that room together…well you can imagine how that has not been good for our bodies. Sadly because SO many of the children are sick and all living together they cant seem to get well either…and sick kids makes them VERY irritable and hard to work with. The women this month have also been working the 10 PM to 6 AM shift staying awake all hours of the night with crying kids and then trying to go back and sleep in a room where 12 other people are constantly in and out of really doesn’t work, so again our bodies are stressed and tired. This whole month I have made plans and then at the end of each day I did almost nothing of what I actually wanted to do. Instead of painting the mural I wanted to help out with I got asked to shovel dirt or be the concrete mixer J
This is where it gets good though…nothing about this month has gone as planned, not much that I did I ever wanted to do, quite the opposite actually, I was challenged each day as I prayed each morning Lord let your will be done today, let me walk and do what YOU want me to do…then finding out my thoughts and plans did not always quite match up with His. Learning to CHOOSE IN to all situations, learning to find the pure beauty in picking weeds because as I did so I memorized a chapter of the bible or had the opportunity to hear my friends’ testimonies and what God was doing in their lives. I learned and embraced what it means to pray for more intimacy with God each day and see how it unfolds in ways I would have never expected. This month in so many more ways then I can explain through a blog has been a series of trials, one after the next. Broken before God on my knees crying out to him through all the different emotional things I have been through this month and on top of everything missing home more then I ever have on the race. There lies all the beauty in the month though, all my strength was found in Jesus, all my joy was found in Jesus, and I realized that when given situations in life and things you may not feel like doing, it’s a choice…your attitude is a choice. And through God showing me and giving me a special heart for this month I have had the most amazing month and experiences doing many things, going through tons of things, that I would not have chosen for myself. But God chose this time and these things for me to go through and then comes our part…I chose to let him use this time in my life to teach me, to not shut down because things didn’t go my way…and such is life isn’t it J Life isn’t perfect, life doesn’t go as planned…but I have found if you will allow your heart and mind to be open to the way God takes your day when you pray for His will, there is more beauty then you could ever imagine in not getting what you want or what you planned for. Does it mean it’s easy? Does it mean there won’t be tears? Definitely not, I wont lie to you there J This month I named the month of trials, the month of letting go, the month of more intimacy with God, and the month of it’s not about me.
And I wouldn’t take back a single moment because I have learned that if you take back the tears that were shed you also would have to take away the hundred smiles that came from those tears…
