Where to start, where to start??? Let me start with prayer requests so that if you get bored with this entry at least you'll have the most important information.
1. A small core group of us are starting a youth group here at our local church. The bible study at the orphanage has been put on hold (at least for now) because I feel like God's calling me to focus the majority of my effort and energy towards the youth group and eventually I hope to form the bible study with the our core kids from youth. As of now we me every other Friday and in the 2 meetings we've had so far we've already seen God's hand moving! Our first meeting was a sort of "get to know each other, and this is what we're about meeting" but still the Lord brought 34 kids to our door. Our second meeting was the official kick off of our youth program and He brought 58 and we're hoping for even more this next Friday. Our goal is not to see how many kids we can get in the door, or to fill seats but it has been encouraging to have God confirm the need for a youth group in our community. So how can you pray? We are still a bit unorganized. A friend of mine Erik who is 30 years old and is a very gifted speaker has volunteered to do most of the preaching but still cannot take the position as a full time youth pastor because the job just isn't in our church's budget. Pray that even through his busy schedule that Erik would have the time to put the necessary amount of work into every sermon and that the words spoken would never be his but always be the Holy Spirit speaking through him. My friend Chad and I will be heading up the worship team. So you can pray that God would provide a team of dedicated, purpose driven worship leaders and that our ultimate goal would continue to be to bring our best before the throne of God and to lead these kids into a time of worship. The rest of our leadership team are our prayer warriors and in my opinion have one of the most important jobs! These are the blessed ones who won't be up in front doing the "fun" stuff but will be laboring away interceding on behalf of the kids, praying their hearts out, and building strong one-on-one relationship with the kids (as will we all) and eagerly awaiting their reward in heaven. We appreciate your prayers... Our God is huge and can do amazing wonderful things. The youth of this town are thirsty and are yearning for something to satisfy them, WE'VE GOT THE ANSWER and we want to share it with everyone! The Lord is doing amazing things in the town of La mision and I am blessed to be a part of it!
2. The crazy summer to come. Right now we are very slow, don't have many groups coming down but that's all about to change fairly quickly. Our summer is packed which is a blessing for sure but still we're in for a busy time! My prayer request would be that amidst all the craziness and hectic times that my personal relationship with Christ and the relationships all the staff of Door of Faith have would continue to be our #1 priority. I know from personal experience that when the days get busier and more things get piled on my plate unfortunately something I tend to cut short first is my quiet alone time with Christ, and I know that fault is found in a lot of those close to me too. WE CANNOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN! Christ is our number one, He is the reason we're doing this and needs to continue to be at the forefront of our minds through everything we do!
3. Health. Not for me personally I'm as healthy as an OX! (a fat ox, but nevertheless an ox) My boss DJ is sick with bronchitis and has been for quite some time now and his wife has also been dealing with some health issues for the last year or so. These two are an amazing blessing to the orphanage and we would love to have them back in full health! Besides them two it just seems like a lot of people around us in our community are getting sick. Not just your common cold but serious illnesses, cancer, car accidents leaving people in hospitals ect. God's timing is perfect and we rest in that amazing truth but we still pray for His healing hand on those around us.
I think that gives you enough to pray for over the next month or so. Things are great here in Mexico, I'm moving to the orphanage by the first of the next month. I have been living at the church in town because it was never ok for a single male to live onsite at the orphanage but God worked on the hearts of the Mexican directors and has allowed me to gain their trust and they asked me to move onsite. This will allow me to be more of a help at the orphanage. There's only so much I can do between the hours of 8am-7pm and once I leave I'm pretty much useless there but now I will be on call 24/7 and always be available to help! God has also blessed me with a chance to go to Spirit West Coast next Friday. Another local orphanage has a booth at spirit west coast that I'll be helping run AND get a free SWC ticket! Again, thank you guys for your prayers and please continue to pray!!! I know it gets harder the more out of touch we get but I will make my best effort to continue to keep you updated. "The Lord hears the prayer of a righteous man" and I know that He's hearing many of your prayers... thanks.
Dios les bendiga,
Ernesto
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Finally in Mexico... it's crazy!
So I'm finally here! Through many long doubles back to back and very generous donations, the LORD has been faithful and provided me everything I could have ever needed to get down here.
I arrived late afternoon on the 28th of April and left immediately at 6am the next day on a missions trip with the local church to Guasave, Sinaloa, Mexico to help build a new church, and encourage the local believers by putting a service on every night at different churches and 3 services on Sunday! After a 60 hour drive round trip I'm back and lemme tell you this, God is amazing and his timing is perfect!
After that last statement you may assume I had a really fun, good time in Sinloa but rather it was a little of the opposite. Yes it was fun and yes I enjoyed a lot of parts of the trip and for those of you who know me I sure did have a lot of laughs along the way but if I were to give the trip a title it would be "Sometimes God has to break you in order to fix you." The trip was hard. I don't have enough time to explain every little detail of what happened because that would take 10 days or so ;) but let me do my best.
Almost the entire focus of the trip was construction. I hate doing construction! :) But God worked with me. I'm not gonna lie, day one when we got to the construction sight and started cutting bars and mixing cement by hand on the ground I wasn't too happy. I was a bit bitter and a bit more frustrated. I wanted to be playing with kids! This town has to have some kids in it right? I kept hoping some of 'em would show up at the construction sight so I could drop the shovel and start a sweet game of tag... but it never happened. That night I lied in my tent on the rock hard ground because I forgot a pad, thoughts of the scorpions and spiders outside ready to crawl through the whole conveniently placed right by my foot and mosquitos, flies and jejemezes (spanish for stupid little satan mosquitos) flying around my face. Then I started to pray. "God, what's the deal? why am I so bitter? This is what I asked for right? I asked for you to bring me to Mexico, I asked that you would give me the privilege of serving your people here didn't I? So what's my problem? Change me LORD, make my heart break for these people. Let me have compassion on them, let me serve them with a pure heart!" Next morning, God began working...
Over the next 7 days or so God really changed my attitude and the funny thing is the trip itself started getting even harder! More "problems" kept getting dropped on my plate with more things to worry about but because of this new changed attitude instead of letting things upset me and ruin my attitude I was able to turn them around into glorifying God through circumstance! I could write forever about all the little adventures and things that happened.... 3 legged dogs, 4 8 year olds ridding 1 motorcycle down the street, 1 10 year old driving a truck past me, miles and miles of corn fields, eating fresh mango off trees, fish dinners caught and prepared the same day, the list goes on!!!! I'm be sure to get some pictures up here really soon too!
After this first 10 days or so I can't say it's been the funnest most enjoyable experience yet, but what I can say is that allowing God to refine your heart hurts, but is beyond worth it!
Dios les bendiga,
Ernesto
I arrived late afternoon on the 28th of April and left immediately at 6am the next day on a missions trip with the local church to Guasave, Sinaloa, Mexico to help build a new church, and encourage the local believers by putting a service on every night at different churches and 3 services on Sunday! After a 60 hour drive round trip I'm back and lemme tell you this, God is amazing and his timing is perfect!
After that last statement you may assume I had a really fun, good time in Sinloa but rather it was a little of the opposite. Yes it was fun and yes I enjoyed a lot of parts of the trip and for those of you who know me I sure did have a lot of laughs along the way but if I were to give the trip a title it would be "Sometimes God has to break you in order to fix you." The trip was hard. I don't have enough time to explain every little detail of what happened because that would take 10 days or so ;) but let me do my best.
Almost the entire focus of the trip was construction. I hate doing construction! :) But God worked with me. I'm not gonna lie, day one when we got to the construction sight and started cutting bars and mixing cement by hand on the ground I wasn't too happy. I was a bit bitter and a bit more frustrated. I wanted to be playing with kids! This town has to have some kids in it right? I kept hoping some of 'em would show up at the construction sight so I could drop the shovel and start a sweet game of tag... but it never happened. That night I lied in my tent on the rock hard ground because I forgot a pad, thoughts of the scorpions and spiders outside ready to crawl through the whole conveniently placed right by my foot and mosquitos, flies and jejemezes (spanish for stupid little satan mosquitos) flying around my face. Then I started to pray. "God, what's the deal? why am I so bitter? This is what I asked for right? I asked for you to bring me to Mexico, I asked that you would give me the privilege of serving your people here didn't I? So what's my problem? Change me LORD, make my heart break for these people. Let me have compassion on them, let me serve them with a pure heart!" Next morning, God began working...
Over the next 7 days or so God really changed my attitude and the funny thing is the trip itself started getting even harder! More "problems" kept getting dropped on my plate with more things to worry about but because of this new changed attitude instead of letting things upset me and ruin my attitude I was able to turn them around into glorifying God through circumstance! I could write forever about all the little adventures and things that happened.... 3 legged dogs, 4 8 year olds ridding 1 motorcycle down the street, 1 10 year old driving a truck past me, miles and miles of corn fields, eating fresh mango off trees, fish dinners caught and prepared the same day, the list goes on!!!! I'm be sure to get some pictures up here really soon too!
After this first 10 days or so I can't say it's been the funnest most enjoyable experience yet, but what I can say is that allowing God to refine your heart hurts, but is beyond worth it!
Dios les bendiga,
Ernesto
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