BRINGING IT!

Yay- Team Number One of the fall teams is HERE!  They arrived without most of their luggage but with happy hearts and excitement.  And I'm excited too.   It's gonna be epic!

I had a good last couple days though....last minute meetings at some of the schools, one last quick trip to Cercado (ahhhhhhhhhhh joy), a tender moment spent at the bedside of a terminally ill woman holding her 3 month old bee-yoo-ti-ful grandson- these are times I wouldn't trade here for anything.   One of the guys on the team this morning asked me what I loved about it here and I sometimes don't even know how to respond to that question.   But I try.   I talk about the unbelievable people here, how they live wide open and they welcome me like family and they are all about the relationships that we have.   I talk about how I love the programs that I'm working with here, helping in the clinic, assisting with the sponsorship stuff at the schools, prepping for the barrio teams,  cruising around doing home visits with the Child Nutrition Project.  I BELIEVE in the programs that we have here and I LOVE participating.   I love my friends here.  I loved seeing Nef and Sandy last night at Principe de Paz helping lead an amazing Youth Rally with like HUNDREDS of youth poured into that place.   I love the drama of baseball and dominos and hoping the blue truck will start.  

But the moments when I feel God MOST here sneak up and surprise me.   When Baby Nicole was born in the campos.... when those kids with the horrible pus-infected-heads showed up at Sobacon and made me cry... when I sit on the back on a moto cruising out to Pueblo Nuevo and the sun is juuuuusssstttt coming down over that river at the bridge... when Kari and I are running at the track and the sky grows bigger around us and we can hear all the gente around us gabbing and laughing and doing their thing.... and when I sit by candlelight at a dying woman's bed and rock her grandson to sleep....  these minutes, these precious precious minutes....make me know I was created for this.    That He is giving me this and letting me FEEL Him here with me...and hey, that just doesn't happen in life every day now, does it?  :)    And the hilarious thing is that none of those moments exactly have a job description or a definition- they just happened somehow someway when i was somewhere I was maybe supposed to be.   Or maybe not.

I'm gonna sit here this morning- it's quiet in the Guesthouse cuz the team is at church and I'm hanging here hoping the luggage will show up...and I'm chilling HARD.    I'm looking at a picture of me when I was maybe 19 or 20, in Haiti on my first mission trip- I cried every day- it was really hard- and I'm holding a little girl named Milla.   Milla with Fathoms of Stories In Her Eyes.  And I'm reading Jesus Calling, because- really- every single time that I remember to read it- Jesus SPEAKS through the pages.  And today it says:

"When you need comfort, I love to enfold you in My arms.  I enable you not only to feel comforted but also to be a channel through whom I comfort others.  Thus you are doubly blessed, because a living channel absorbs some of whatever flows through it. "

Psalms 34:  I will bless the Lord at all times;

his praise shall continually be in my mouth.

2 My soul makes its boast in the Lord;

let the humble hear and be glad.

3 Oh, magnify the Lord with me,

and let us exalt his name together!

4 I sought the Lord, and he answered me

and delivered me from all my fears.

And 2 Cor 1:3-4

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the FATHER OF COMPASSION and the God of ALL COMFORT, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God..."

Digging it....but I bet you could tell that already.  

nik