Aguilar
, Chiapas, Mexico
– 19:27 – Jan 21
We arrived here in Aguilar on Monday afternoon after about 2 hours of curvy driving through the mountains. Team Hupomone and Team YETI together.
We’ve been staying in a very nice house for the area. Concrete floors, stucco walls, tin roof, electricity, gas stove, running water, refrigerator, toilet (no seat though) shower, big covered porch and 4 huge hammocks. We were blessed to be able to stay here.
The man who owns the house is Alfredo. He’s a great guy who seems to be a key member in the small church here that we’ve been working with. He’s a real cowboy who has very generously let 11 Americans take over his entire house. We had a problem the other day where the toilet overflowed and he totally took care of everything with a servant attitude.
Retterbush and Alfredo
This is Pedro, who I think is Alfredo´s son. He´s helping us cut up this chicken.
Ministry wise we’ve been going house to house with the pastor and talking with people. We’ve done a lot of prayer walking and talking with people. We’ve spent a lot of time playing with kids. We’ve played soccer with them, gone swimming and just exploring.
The main thing we’ve been doing here is running a VBS for the kids at 5pm and then doing an adult service at 6. Everyday. It’s been a bit of a challenge to come up with things to do each night, especially for the adult service. We’ve had to do all of this without a translator. (Translators out of Palenque cost about $75 USD/day. OUTRAGEOUS!) We’ve relied on Talia and Annie for translation, and they’ve been great but there’s a lot they don’t understand. So it has created quite a limitation for us.
We’ve fallen back on the fact that ‘actions speaker louder than words’ and ‘they will know we are Christians by our love.’
As far as me personally, I had my typical 2 days or so of adjustment to the new place and situation and so I was kind of out of it for a few days. And as I write this I’m dealing with the worse sinus infection/head cold I can ever remember having. And I apologize for the boringness of this post, I’m not very patient to make it better.
We’ve got Monday & Tuesday off that we will spend in Palenque and at Samuel’s. Samuel is a pastor out here in the mountains that has been the contact for all of Team A who is spread throughout the mountains in 3 towns. He has a place right by a river and waterfall and is supposedly going to make us some great food.
A couple cool stories: I think it was Tuesday night (our second day here) we prayed for God to give us an English translator. The very next morning the pastor, Javier, me and two others (Jon and Talia I think) ended up going to the high school here in town. Javier introduced us to Moises, the English teacher there, and he was very excited to meet us and agreed to translate for us at our services that night! We talked with him for about an hour that night too. Because of scheduling we’ll only see and use him for 3 more days that we will be here, but nonetheless, it was such an answer to prayer.
Then just today, I literally witnessed a miracle. I was in the guys bedroom here on the hammock resting and photoshopping, and Clinton came in and was telling me how one of his lenses came out of his glasses. We were up on a mountain praising God earlier this morning and he was worried that it fell out either up there or on the way. He looked for it in here for a little bit and went back into the living room to look for it. He said he prayed that he would find it, and I said a quick little prayer for the same thing. He came back in maybe 3 minutes later and looked down on the corner of the bed and there was lens. Clear as day. Even the tiny little screw was sitting there right next to it. And I’m telling you, there was no way we didn’t see it there before. It seriously was a miracle.
STAY TUNED…..for lots of pictures of Aguilar
