Cristo Salua: CHRIST SAVES!

Hola MorningStar! After a lovely breakfast of eggs,beans,and cereal we headed back to Torre Fuerte for our VBS Program with The Prodigal Son. While most of us worked with the kids, Judi and Sarah printed and posted 183 photos of kids onto picture frames for tomorrows crafts. Throughout the morning, Paul,John, and Pastor Jimmy recorded videos showing what we've been doing all week. During our skit, Walt was pretty convincing as the cow that gets killed. 

Anna has been our fearless leader all week leading VBS! We are all so very thankful for her being here to help us this week. Without her, we would probably be really lost when it comes to our skits.

The kids left at 11 today and after that, we began to finish our painting. The pastors wife and some other women in the church made us a traditional Guatemalan meal for lunch. Can't tell you the name of the meal..but it was delicious!

 After hours of painting, we had to clean up,head back to the hotel to shower,eat dinner and head back to the school for an incredible church service. While we were packing up at the school, it started to rain. It wasn't expected, but it was a very nice cooldown as today seemed to be one of the hottest days of the week.

The church service this evening was absolutley incredible. It started out with worship music, two of the songs they sang were Here I am To Worship and Open The Eyes of My Heart Lord. Their pastor led the worship, with an incredible voice! How come MorningStar's pastors don't sing?!?!After that, Pastor Jimmy was able to get up and give a short message. One of the things he touched on was: There are no benchwarmers, spectators, or subs on God's team. On a closing note before I head to bed, Pastor Jimmy's closing comment was: Come and see. Go and tell.

"Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily what he wants from you,and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-fomed maturity in you"-Romans 12:2

Torre Fuerte:Strong Tower

Hello World! Sorry for the delayed blog post, the wifi connection at the hotel was being wonky last night. So here is the blog post for Tuesday!
 
We began our day at Torre Fuerte,which in English means Strong Tower(cue Kutless' song Strong Tower) It is a school and church. We did our VBS Program with dancing,drama&a craft. The kids very much enjoyed doing the dances with us, and we had fun doing it with them! The drama was about Jesus' death on the cross and His resurection. Todd did an awesome job as Jesus, all three or four places we did this drama at.

During one of the songs,Anna sneezed. You're prolly wondering why I'm telling you that Anna sneezed. Well after the VBS, the pastor of the church came up and asked if she was sneezing in English or Spanish. Apparently, the achoo noise you make when you sneeze is slang for tomato in Spanish. Now everytime someone sneezes, we are all saying tomato. We also discovered that horses enjoy roaming the streets unaccompanied. Pretty interesting.

 After the children left at noon,and after our lunch and post afternoon nap(shown above),we began to paint the school. Todd also did an awesome job showing us the ropes of painting. He's a pro! While painting, we delighted ourselves with some acapella music. We seemed to be very slaphappy at this point,must of been the paint. It was discovered that Pastor Jimmy has inpecable taste in music. He knows all the words to Stacy's Mom..it seemed to be our theme song for the day. We eventually moved on to worship music. We listened to Mark Roach and the MSC Praise Band CD's on the Ipad. Mark Roach and the worship team totally put on a concert in Guatemala..and they didn't even know it! The teenagers also decided to get Pastor Jimmy back for his competitiveness at the basketball game the first day. We attacked him with paint.

After the school/church, we drove about 15 minutes to another feeding center to do a VBS Program. The children there were so enthusiastic that we were there,and alot of us were able to communicate with them easily. Those of us that don't speak much Spanish are really catching on.

During our downtime before dinner, we all relaxed by the pool and prepared for Wednesday's VBS craft. We glued together over 400 popsicle sticks and cut about 600 yards of yarn for our God's Eyes craft. For dinner, we had pizza from a local pizzera Giorgio's. Immediately after dinner a bunch of us headed to the soccer fields to play a team of youth aged 17-25. We never decided on a team name but it was either: Gringo,JesusCristo,USA or MorningStar. The team was: Paul,Jimmy,MaryAnn,Sarah,Christiane,Kailey,Paige,Todd,Walt and Seth. We lost, but we didn't necessarily get our butts kicked. About halfway through the game is when we really go into it. We probably scored about 6 goals, and the Guatemalans scored at least 13.



And we finally ended our day with some much needed, and well earned sleep.

El Rancho:

HAPPY PI DAY!(I was the only one on the team enthusiastic about today,but maybe thats because everyoe else was half asleep at 5am when I announced it to evryone)

The alarm sounded a 4:15 am. Nope,no typo there. Very very early wakeup time. We were supposed to head out at 5am, but we didn't leave til 515. We left so early because we needed to travel to the other side of Guatemala City before rush hour traffic. We stopped at McDonalds a little before 7am for breakfast, it was pretty delicious. I personally say it's better than McDonalds in the states. The McDonalds was interesting because they did not have jelly. Another cool fact was that they played US Music like what's on Z1077..ex: Brittney Spears and Katy Perry. After Mickey D's, we drove about an hour and a half to our hotel. After dropping off our luggage, we headed another 20 minutes away to El Rancho for some light construction and a VBS Program. The light construction was putting a roof on a feeding center. We started out by painting and then later on the strong men put the roof up. By the end of the day, almost the entire roof was up! It was very very hot outside-but no complaints here because it's better than snow :)

During some down time, the teenagers started talking with some of the kids that were hanging around. At first, we weren't sure how to communicate because of the language barrier. We soon discovered that the language barrier is not a barrier at all. We pointed to items and asked how to say it in Spanish, and then we told them how to say it in English. In return, the children taught us some of the games that they play for fun. We had no idea what was going on, but seeing them laugh and have fun was an awesome sight. We broke out a few soccer balls, and our two track stars Kailey and Paige got their workout for the day! They were kicking the ball around and also playing chase.

For lunch, the pastors wife and some other women made us lunch. They didn't have to-but they did. It was an incredible meal. Before lunch, they were making tortillas. Some of our team went back and watched. Some attempted, but for most it was a fail. But it was so much fun to try :)

The children absolutley love having their pictures taken! We ask before we take photos-and when we weren't they were asking us to take them. They also had so much fun dancing at the VBS Program! Before we began-they were singing for us! One of the songs they sang, was also one of our VBS songs! There was so much love for Christ at that church-it was incredible.After the program, we gave out some of our giveaway stuff: toothbrush,toothpaste,pencil,eraser,coloring book&crayons!

After cleaning up, we headed back to the hotel for dinner and preparing for tomorrows adventure.
It's been an incredible day serving the Lord. We're all excited to head out tomorrow to show the love of Christ to more children!

Highlights of the day:
-Kailey teaching the children to play volleyball..with a soccer ball.
-Seth looked good all day(his words)
-Our track stars getting their daily workout shoving cement with a broken shovel and playing chase with the kids.
-The chickens that were running around everywhere
-Seeing the passion that Pastor Gonsavo had to serve Christ even being partially blind and deaf.
It was a very motivating and inspirtational day for us all.And guess what?
 WE GET TO DO IT AGAIN TOMORROW!!!!!

Guatemala Day 1: Sunday March 13th

Hola!

    Our journey began with the van ride to Chicago on Saturday evening. We arrived in Chicago a little after midnight on Saturday. After checking in, and surviving security, we had some downtime before boarding the plane. If you can't already tell from the above photo, Pastor Jimmy was realllyyy reallyyy tired,and could care less about who he snuggled up against. His wife was assured he'd be taken care of...so I guess this means he's in good hands?

Anyway, we landed in Guatemala City at 6:25am, right on time! After going through customs and recieving our luggage, we headed outside to meet our host, Randy & Brenda. We loaded the luggage into the back of a truck, then headed to a van to travel to the mission house. After getting settled in, the teenagers&Pastor Jimmy decided it would be fun to play a game of basketball. Pastor Jimmy tends to get  very competitive while playing basketball with teenagers.But it was a fun time :)

Around 4, we headed to a church service at the house of a local pastor named Yovany. It was a very small congregation,our team outnumbered their congregation. It was an incredible service, he talked about being the light of Christ. After the service, we all hung out and drank coffee. We had a chance to talk with some of the congregation.Surprisingly, alot of them could communicate with us in English. It was very interesting getting to talk with them.

After an incredible dinner back at the mission house, and preparing for tomorrows VBS lesson, we all gathered together for our evening devotion. We did two worship songs: How Great Is Our God, and The Happy Song. It was incredible getting to gather,worship,and talk about the days events,and what is to come.
Now, we are all super tired, because alot of us have not slept more than a few hours since we got up Saturday morning.

The entire mission team sends their love back to the States,as we are all now heading to bed.

But before I go..heres some facts I learned today about Guatemala:
-It is illegal for 2 people to ride on a motorcycle together.
-There are 4 active volcanoes in the country, the other 30ish are dormant.
-Gas is a little over $4 a gallon, and it has been that way for a while.
-Pastor Jimmy can be a very competitive person

"Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you,and quickly respond to it.Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you" Romans 12:2