Well I had this whole story typed out beforehand, but apparently this computer wont read the file type. So here it goes again. It has been a great week of continued training down here. We have had some great speakers come down to Palenque to continue to equip us for what we are going to encounter the rest of the year. The training has been great and I know is much needed to be ready for the rigors of the following year. We have been able to enjoy a little fun before we started. Our first day here in Palenque, we went to a festival that a local church was throwing for the community. We got to be a part of a really great church service in three languages, English, Spanish, and Choll(the native tongue). After the service we ate the cow that they had literally just killed for this event. It was delicious! Then we went to the beautiful waterfalls of Aqua Azul. They are pretty incredible. I think I put a photo of them in the last blog (my timeline on these things is a little screwed up).
But we have also been able to do some real ministry. On Monday, our team was invited by our local contact to go to a drug and alcohol rehab center. I though we were going to hang out with these guys and do something simple. But when we got in the truck with Eliazar, he asked us, ¨ok, so who is preaching today?¨ My first response was, ühh, your joking right?¨ But no we had the car ride there to figure out what we were gonna do. So when we arrived, Jake went right up to the front and just started bustin out all sorts of Spanish. He was flowing better than I had ever heard him speak before. Then it was my turn. I spoke for a while (in Spanish), feeling like I was choking my whole way through. But I was able to get out what I felt led to say, and then passed the torch to Kelly who did great up there. But she got off easy because Eliazar translated for her (just kidding). But at the end we asked if anyone wanted to turn their lives over to Christ, and about 15 people jumped up at the offer. So we promptly prayed for them and led them through the proper prayer. It was pretty amazing because it clearly was not the doing of any wit of words that I could put together. It was just a few simple words of love and God did the rest. So it was great for me to see that it really doesn’t matter how well I can do out there, because God is so big that even I can´t screw up His plans. So we intend to go back a few more times before we leave this area to try to deepen some relationships and help those men out who made commitments to grow and understand what it means to be a follower of Christ. It was a humbling experience indeed and Im so glad that God showed me that early. It makes it a lot easier for me to go out there and do it again.
Mexico is so wonderful and I love it! Thank you so much for all of your prayers and support! I love you guys!
