Life continues to be a blur out here - it's hard to believe that it's already March 20! This week we had two teams out here, one being a youth group from Flagstaff, AZ and the other was a homeschool group from Bozeman MT. We've been running in many different directions trying to keep the crazy from turning into chaos!
It has been good but Tuesday was one of those days that started chaotic but God had His hand in all of it. Right after lunch I took one of the teams out to the city of Empalme to distribute food hampers, clothes, and a trailer full of household articles that we had received from someone who had passed away recently here in San Carlos.
We arrived at the church of a pastor (the same pastor who is planning to run camps out of his church this summer) who was going to lead us to a different, more needy part of the city. But sure enough he wasn't here. So, after a number of phone calls, we finally got a hold of him (and as it turned out, we, the North Americans were late and he had been waiting for us before). A number of phone calls later (with my Spanish being severely put to the test) we finally got on the same page and he met us at the church a little while later. He took us lead us to a very poor part of Empalme and connected us with the pastor of a small church there.
Once there, we broke up into groups of four and five and wandered the streets, finding places to distribute food hampers and inviting them to a central place where we would later hand out the clothes and other stuff we had.
My group ended up taking a long time; by the time we returned all the clothes had been given away. Because we were out of time, we decided, with the pastor of the church there, to just give the trailer full of stuff to him to give away to the community at a later date - giving him a neat opportunity to connect with the surround community. As we moved all the stuff into their church, we noticed that the roof over their church was only half done. The structure was about a 25 by 50 foot building. The pastor told us how they had been raising money for some time to finish it. They had $300 saved and needed about $1000 to finish it. Another man who was also from Flagstaff (and spending some time in San Carlos) who had joined us for the day decided to give that church the money they needed to finish their roof. As we were telling him this, he was overwhelmed with all that we were able to do for him, from the stuff given to the money to finish their house. It was neat to see God at work even when we didn't always know what was going on. It was a great end to a somewhat chaotic day!
No comments:
Post a Comment