A very full day

Tuesday, June 4

Matthew 19:26:  But Jesus looked at them and said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Today our team participated in several activities:
1. Pastors Jared and Sean lead a Pastors’ Conference on Worship
2. Mary and Jenn lead a similar conference on worship for the Pastors’ wives
3. In the morning the remainder of the team continued with the concrete work on the church
4. In the afternoon, the ladies returned to Naomi’s house to play with the children she cares for and the men carried on with the concrete work.

The turnout for the conferences was amazing!  There were 135 attendees including pastors, wives, and worship leaders.  The attendees came from distances as far as a 4 hour drive to attend the conference.  The presentations were well received and all present were blessed.

The work we did on the church was beyond our imagination.  The Scripture above describes how I felt during the day, since what we accomplished was more than we ever dreamed.  We placed 127 bags of concrete (recipe:  1 bag concrete, 1 bucket water, 3 1/2 buckets sand, and 4 buckets rock).  It was only by God’s strength that we were able to accomplish all of this.  Needless to say, we were all very tired at the end of the day, but we knew that we came to serve and that our service is not based on our strength, but on the power of the Holy Spirt at work in us.

We definitely missed the ladies in the afternoon - they really worked hard on the church and were a key reason we accomplished so much today.  They shoveled dirt to cover up some of the concrete we placed yesterday, carried water for the concrete, and filled buckets with sand and rock.  To put it it simply:  “they rocked!”  See Mary’s blog below for details of their afternoon.

I feel so blessed to be part of this team, since I don’t live in Salt Lake City, but am welcomed by the team each time I join them.  Every time I return to Guatemala and work with the people of Iglesia Galilea and the team from Risen Life Church I feel like I take away much more than I am able to give.

Gerry

Four women manned the shovels and buckets on the church construction site today.  Filling in a trench with dirt, shoveling gravel and dirt into buckets and hauling them to the cement mixer, carrying buckets of water from one water tank to another we weaved in and out of the men who were pushing wheel barrels and mixing cement.  I had the opportunity to try the wheel barrel a few times, hauling wet cement to an open trench and pouring blind over the edge.  Corby kept a close watch and gave orders, “Back up, back up! “  So none of us were pulled over the edge of the trench by the wheel barrel, though Christina had a close call.   It felt good to have sore muscles by lunch.  

In the afternoon the women went to Naomi’s other house where the low functioning girls live. Naomi had brought the other four over as well, so we had opportunity to play with all of them.   I was surprised by how happy the girls were. They love to play DJ for their mom.  She plays their song requests on her phone and the girls dance quite dramatically.  We also jumped on the trampoline with some of the girls or just held others that couldn’t do much besides be cuddled. Naomi was free to talk about the challenges of being a single mom to so many disabled children and she also shared more of what God has done to heal some of the children.  

A song that has been going through my head today is “Word of God speak, won’t you fall down like rain, washing our eyes to see your majesty, to be still and know that you’re in this place, please let me stay and rest in your holiness.”   Though the country of Guatemala has so many problems God is displaying His majesty in the work being done here.   One of Naomi’s girls named Lopita was born with her heart on the wrong side.  The hospital did x-rays and scans and determined that her blood was flowing the wrong direction.  I don’t remember all of the details but the surgeons were negligent during the surgery, opened her up on the left side (despite the xrays showing the heart on the other side), and then closed her back up.  They told Naomi that Lopita would die. However, God is not boxed in by the limits or science or man’s capabilities and a week later she was healed.  Though no new scans have been done to determine what has changed, Lopita is now a joyful, outgoing, active girl.