9 hours of peace...

One group out, two groups in. The team from this week left just this morning around 8:30am and the next group is coming in later this afternoon followed by another team that is coming in tomorrow evening. I'm tired from the last week and somehow Art and Brenda have been keeping up this pace for more than the past two months. God gives us strength and energy as we need it.

The team that just left was from the youth group from Art and Brenda's church in Montana. The week was full of many different kinds of ministry opportunities including:

• painting a classroom in a church in Guaymas


• distributing food hampers


• distributing clothes


• painting a school in a local native village

With each of these came opportunities for the team to build relationships with the people and share the gospel message through drama and more.

Perhaps the opportunity that had the most impact on the team was the roof we replaced on a lady's "house" in Guaymas. Monday afternoon, as the group was doing the painting at the church, some of the team members along with a couple members of the church went out into the surrounding community and distributed some food hampers. In one of the houses that they visited lived a woman with two boys, one junior high aged and one high school aged. They noticed not only the condition of the house (which wouldn't have passed for a garden shed in Canada) but the fact that there were some large holes in the roof.

The team decided to take it upon themselves to raise the money and repair the roof. It was humbling to see as there was one point, as we were working on the house, the older boy came out of the house with a look of pride on his face, at the vast improvement that was being done to his house. It was especially humbling because even with the new, reinforced roof, their "house" was still something far beyond anything we would consider livable. Then you look around in the surrounding community and the amount of need is overwhelming.

The house before repair.

And after.

This woman and her boys had not been connected with the church that we were working out of but the connecting had been made and our prayers are that she will find here way to that congregation and hear about God's love because of the hand of love that was extended to her and her family through the team.