Hello everyone!
I´m back in Palenque for today then i head out to a sweet little chunk of land next to a river/waterfall that is owned by a guy named Samuel that has been our main contact in Mexico (Eleazar was huge too) and who hooked up all the teams with their sites for the past 17 days. we´ll be there for 2 days debriefing and relaxing and recharging our batteries. one day, whoever wants to can go over to Misol-ha, a sweet waterfall nearby. I´ll probably do that. I´m battling somekind of something though that is making me feel weak. I had a sore-throat last night and earlier today.
anyway, we left Aguilar this morning. It´s crazy to think that all 11 of us probably will never again set foot in Aguilar.
That´s so weird to think about. Yeah, it was only two weeks that we were actually there, but to never see those people again? Crazy.
Here´s a little something I wrote to a lady at my local newspaper. It´s what we did in a nutshell.
“Our typical days consisted of: personal time with God, breakfast, planning for the evening services, randomly walking around town praying and playing with kids, lunch, more prayer walking/house visits and playing with kids and rest, then the services from 5-7pm, supper and then just down time to do whatever until we went to bed.
It was a challenging couple of weeks with figuring out what God wanted us to do everyday, accepting the fact that we could not communicate effectively, and trying to be motivated for our ministries when the pastor we were working with didn’t seem very passionate about his work.
All in all, and amidst the struggles, my team and I feel at peace with what we did there. We’ll probably always have feelings of whether we could’ve done more, but we feel we did well.
Sunday morning we will all find out where in
Guatemala we will be heading and start the next leg of the race. “
It really was an interesting two weeks. Maybe it wasn´t actually that interesting…no, it was interesting. For me, I always feel like I have to be productive all the time. So like, relaxing at home and resting or photoshopping stuff, and even sometimes just chillin with God…I don´t feel like I´m being productive. Maybe just because I´m at home and not out amongst the people. You can´t give what you don´t have though. So if I need to spend more time with God, and not be out in the town as much, that´s ok right? I´m pretty sure it is, but it´s hard for me to justify sometimes. Not sure if this is all because of my upbringing or not…but I suppose it is just something to work on and get better at.
The biggest challenge we faced in Aguilar, (well two challenges actually), was our lack of effective translation. We struggled with this because we couldn´t communicate enough and therefore how do you effectively do church services and establish relationships if you can´t verbally communicate? I wrote about this earlier how we decided to just let our ´actions speak louder than words´ and `they will know we are christians by our love’, but it´s tough to only be able to do that. How do you truly know how you´ve been received and if you´ve truly affected people and if they´ve seen God through you? How do you know if the people are truly being insanely generous and hospitable or if they are just doing it because the pastor told them too or Samuel put it in their contract to fix us a huge meal on our last night? How can you truly be sure of stuff like this when you can´t completely understand what a person is saying to you?
If you know Talia Barnes though, send her a note of thanks and encouragement. She translated her butt off the past two weeks. She is not fluent by any means, but she did all she could and more. Hours upon hours of translating testimonies and sermons to the best of her ability took it´s toll on her I´m sure. So thank you for all you did Talia!
The second biggest challenge we faced was the fact that the town, the church and even the pastor seem spiritually dead or lacking the passion for running his church. When the town and the church seems dead, it´s kinda hard to keep being excited about what you are doing. And when the pastor your working with seems to be seriously lacking passion for the church and the town, it´s hard to be motivated to be passionate yourself.
during the adult service
I do want to tip my hat to the girls on my team: Brienna, Annie & Joy. Especially Brienna. They spent a ton of time with the local kids and did all kinds of fun stuff with them. They majorly loved on them! Kudos to you guys!
Here´s something off the subject, 5 World Racers currently have a picture that I took as there main photo! SWEETNESS!
having church on the top of a little mountain.
STAY TUNED for another blog of pictures
