23.3.13

So yesterday, we had our Reto Extremo (Extreme Challenge), which was a physical challenge this time. We were told the night before that we needed to, by 9:30 the next morning, fill our [alpine] backpacks full of 30 pounds of rocks and 3 liters of water. So that’s what we did.. or so we thought. When Josh asked to see our water, most of us had under 3 liters (I had 2 ½), and this is what followed:

Josh: “..two hundred pushups.”
us: “haha um”
Josh:
us: “without our backpacks, right?”
Josh: “..with.”
us:
Josh:
us:
Josh: “next time listen to the details, eh?”

At this point I’m trying to think positive and have a good attitude, but let’s be real, I have chicken muscles. I lowered myself for the first one and was immediately pressed all the way to the grass thanks to my 30 pound load of rocks. After recovering from that, I managed to crank out 95 (only going down one inch with my arms- I’m not Hulk), before he got sick of waiting for us and told us what our actual challenge was. There is this hill, well small mountain- I’m told it’s actually a dead volcano- that is about 5 or 8 miles from the orphanage, covered in trees. Our mission was to walk to it, climb up to the top, climb down and come back (without tossing out rocks on the way), as well as encounter someone in our journey, pray over them, and bless them with a prophetic word from God.

It was 10:30AM when 8 of 11 of us headed out under the cloudless sky, sun shining bright overhead. Not seven minutes in, we see a man up ahead arriving at a field to work. I started praying for him, asking that God would put a word or image on my heart that would encourage him. After a bit, I felt the word “espera” (which means wait) pressed into my chest. When we reached this man, Gustavo stopped and asked about how far the mountain was, and then asked if we could pray for him, just that God would bless his life + work. So we did, and while we were praying, I saw in my mind an image of a heart being covered by a darkish mold substance. I asked God what He wanted me to do with that, like what it meant or what I should say, but I didn’t get anything past that. Well Manuel finished the prayer, no one had anything to say, so they said goodbye and started walking away. I felt like I should share the word with the man (for whatever it was worth), so I said “I feel like God gave me a word to share with you, which is wait, and He will give you rest.” Esmi then piped up “Yeah, I also felt like there’s an area of your life where there’s a lack of forgiveness, like I saw your heart harboring something that is hard to let go, but I want you to know that there is forgiveness.” The man’s eyes clouded over a bit and he looked in the distance and said “Yeah, it is really hard to forgive.” And Esmi said “There is forgiveness.” And then we smiled and left. And I was just really… filled with joy at what happened, cus both me and Esmi had gotten different messages from God that fit together to speak to this man.

Throughout this trek to the mountain, we walked through the dustiest of fields, passed five burros, walked down several never-ending dirt roads, talked about the food we wanted to eat at the moment, and climbed the skinny, rocky-slippery paths to reach the top of the mountain, taking multiple stops to restore our breath. So remember that this mountain is actually a dead baby volcano? We got to the cauldron part, and there was all these random itty fires burning. I was like, the heck? Who’s starting fires in the forest? Does Smokey Bear care about this part of the world? But I guess it was related to its volcanic past? Anyways, at this point, I was feeling incredibly childish (roughly the mentality of a seven-year-old) so I began throwing pinecones at everyone’s head and giggling hysterically. I think my humor was lost on some people. Also I started scurrying around stomping out the fires, shrieking “I’M SAVING YOUR LIVES IM SAVING THE WORLD”.