Gloria A Dios!

Well, here I sit, on my second to last night at El Sembrador.  On Saturday I am leaving to go on a week-long retreat with the missionaries in Honduras, and then I will be heading back home.  It seems like I have only been here for a few days, and yet I learned enough to fill a lifetime.  But I will go into detail about that when I have more time to sit and reflect.  For now, I am giving just a quick update in between laundry, packing, finishing up some last minute work in the office, and trying to make sure I say good-bye to everyone.

My last week at El Sembrador has been filled with a mission team that came down on Sunday.  We are working on building a fence in the mornings around a small one-room school in town, and in the afternoons we are putting on a Bible School for the kids that go to the school (and all the neighbor kids who heard about us coming).  On Monday we had about 25 kids.  By Wednesday we were scrounging to have enough chairs for everyone to sit in.  This has been a very stretching week for me, mostly because I have never been considered a "leader" of a mission team, and now I am learning what it takes to lead a team through a mission trip.  And also, my translator training wheels finally came off, and I have been leading the Bible School every day this week.  It was scary at first, but the kids have been so patient with my sometimes-incoherent Spanish, and they seem to be really enjoying themselves!

Here are some pictures of our adventures this week:

                                                     The school where we are working

                                                   Kids waiting patiently for Bible School

                                                 Emil-a really shy and really sweet little boy

One semi-spur-of-the-moment thing I got to do was teach some boys at the school how to make tie-dye shirts!  I'm pretty sure I shrunk all of them in the wash accidentally, but hopefully they can still wear them!

It almost seems a little unfair that life is so short.  There are so many amazing people in the world, and there is no possible way to meet all of them.  Even at El Sembrador, I wish I had three more lifetimes to get to know all of the wonderful people that work here and go to school here.  It would take volumes of books to tell you all that I have learned from the people here and how encouraging and inspiring it is to watch them in their walk with Christ.  I guess that's why we wait in expectation for heaven-it probably will take eternity to get to know all of God's beautiful creations!  And even though it makes me a little sad in the meantime, I know it will be worth the wait.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling!  When I'm relaxing at the beach next week, I will write my last blog to finish up the trip.  But while you wait, here's a picture of one of the views near my house:

The picture hardly does it justice, but it will have to do for now!  Good night, and for a lot of you I will see you soon!