RachelsAdventure.com

Today was a really great day (and yes, that is a picture of sheep...not deer as you would guess by the title of the post.  I just thought they were so cute and we could get so close to them at the park!).

I went with the youth group to a park that would be about 15 minutes from my house by car...but by bus it takes nearly an hour

I always have mixed feelings when I hang out with the kids...I love youth but I hate not being able to talk to them.  I can ask simple questions and laugh along

We had a new girl with us today and I wanted to tell you all about her. 

A couple of months ago a woman stopped me on the street and asked me if I worked at the school and if I taught in the English Club.  English Club meets Thursday evening after school...it's an outreach ministry of the church and it's very popular.  I teach an advanced English class first hour and the High School English class second hour. 

The woman asked for information about English club and told me that she would like to send her daughter.  I told her the time and said that I would see her on Thursday. 

This would have been a really cool story if I told her the correct information, alas, I did not. 

English Club times are much like service times when I worked at Abundant Life...I was there the whole time anyway so I could never really remember what time each service started.  Sadly, I told this woman on the street the COMPLETELY wrong time, like so wrong she showed up for English Club after it was over.  Oops.

I was really excited that the woman and her daughter showed up but SO embarrassed that I had given her such bad information.  I apologized as best I could and then found a fluent Spanish speaker and asked him to continue to apologize for me. The woman was very forgiving and her daughter (let's call her *Rosa) showed up (at the correct time) to English Club the following week and has been attending ever since....she is even in my High School class now.

Now, remember that I said the English Club is an outreach of the church, right?  They don't always make a big deal about the connection between the church and the club but someone invited Rosa to the park with us this weekend...and she came!!!

So, while we were riding over to the park, I was thinking about how this all started with me totally dropping the ball but the cool thing is, God is amazingly faithful...He was able to take my mistake and still use it for good. 

Thank you, God.

To top it all off, the weather was fantastic and the park was beautiful.  Here's some video from today (it's from my phone so it's pretty poor quality) but you can see that everyone was having fun.

*I changed her name for this post.

You'd think that being a missionary the whole "church thing" wouldn't be taken care of (I mean, I'm down here on a church planting team!) but it's really not.  I spend most of my Sunday's in a service that I can barely understand (I do lots of smiling and nodding!).  So, now I have global church.  I go to my Las Aguilas church on Sunday, enjoy being a joven and practice my Spanish...then I listen to podcasts during the week from churches across the US (I LOVE podcasts).

Last week I was listening to a message from the Village Church.  The Lead Pastor there is Matt Chandler, I heard him a year ago at a conference and have been listening to his podcast ever since.  I love how he teaches the Word of God with such unabashed passion.  When you listen to him you know that he loves God and God's Word and he wants others to, also!

On Thanksgiving Matt, who is a 35 year old husband and father of three, had a seizure...which lead to the doctor's discovering a tumor on the right frontal lobe of this brain.  Last Friday, the 4th of December, Matt had surgery to remove the tumor and sometime this week they will know whether or not it is cancerous.

Bam!  Just like that his world has flipped upside down.  I'm am sharing this with you for a couple reasons:
1) So that you can pray for Pastor Matt and his family and 2) So that you can watch this video that was posted before his surgery.  I admire this man's faith.  I have been fearful at certain times over the past 6 months...but when I watch his video it challenges me to live a life of faith...to continue to trust God (not just in the good/easy times).
3) Also, just to be transparent, I hope that someday I have a husband who can say this about me  (see #5).  Wow. 

I just went to the Congreso Juvenil Cristiano (basically Mexico’s equivalent of a CIY conference) and it was a lot of fun.  I started the weekend with prayer.  I anticipated that it was going to be one of those weekends that I survived not one of those weekends that I was going to enjoy.  I was wrong.

Normally youth events are my favorite.  I love large groups of high school kids…it’s where I can “get my joke on” and have a good time…but this was a different story.  Add a language barrier and suddenly, something that would have invigorated me actually terrifies me.  I am not one to shy away from any social setting but I’ve seen this whole new (previously unknown) side of myself now that I live in a Spanish-speaking country.  It’s so different when you can’t communicate (wow, I have so much more sympathy for minorities and English learners in the US…this is hard stuff).  So, I’ve developed this (very accurate!) scale for embarrassing language situations ranging from
1= “piece of cake, I'm practically fluent” to
10=“I wish I had a shirt that matched the wallpaper so that no one would notice that I’m here.”

1-      Pets/Plants
2-      Small Children
3-      Taxi/Bus Drivers
4-      One Teen
5-      Adults
8-      Men with guns
11-    A group of teens

As you can see, the Congreso put me right at the upper end of my scale…and I was feeling it.  I wanted to hide in my room most of the time (wow, who is this Rachel?!) because not only could I not communicate…I was also one of the very few gringos in this whole place and I stuck out like sore thumb.  I got in trouble the first night for skipping my discussion group time (long story short and all excuses aside…I think I’ve explained before that when you are unmarried in Mexico you are considered a youth (even if you are older) so I went as a youth worker but ended up being registered as a youth…let’s just say that churches in Mexico are a very humbling place for a girl who’s trying to convince herself that she’s a fully functional and complete adult without a husband because they keep throwing me in classes with 12 year olds!!!)

I didn’t want to just survive the weekend and I knew that hiding in my room the whole time was stupid… so, I kept praying.  We were divided into color groups and I really wanted a buddy in my color group so that someone could help me understand what was going on.  I could catch most of the dialogue, but suddenly with 20 teens talking at once I missed a lot (oh, did I mention that we had to perform a skit in front of everyone and write and perform a song with all group members participating…see the chart above for my feelings about this)…and wouldn’t you know it, God provided a buddy for me.  I quickly became the group novelty (again, I was the only gringo) and they asked me to “preach” in our skit.  Fantastic.  Can we heap on any additional embarrassment!?  Haha.

The topic of the weekend was the Holy Spirit and the theme was "Muevete" and it all really hit home.  God gave me the opportunity to come down here and serve...that doesn't mean it's supernaturally easy.  Sometimes it's hard and all I want to do is hide in my room.  It's in those moments that (most of the time) I choose to pray and push forward.  Through it all I met some really great people from Pachuca (we have a church plant there) and I hope to get up to visit them in January or February and I even had fun. 

To top it all off, we finished the weekend with commitments and baptisms…the first ones I’ve seen since I got here.  There is nothing like watching someone get baptized…it brings me to tears every time.  A couple of the kids in our group rededicated their lives and it seemed like they had a great time.

Here's a picture from one of the baptisms.  This guy was in my small group (you know, the one I skipped the first night) and it was really cool to watch.  (okay...upload trouble tonight...picture coming later!)