2.4.13

I woke up this morning at 4:15 with the worst stomach pain I think I’ve ever had. I spent an hour in the bathroom in tears, constantly switching positions over the toilet, trying one way or another to rid myself of whatever horrific beast had taken up residence in my intestines. Nothing helped, however, and at 5 I found it tolerable to lay back in bed and fall asleep. Three hours later I was awake and in the bathroom again, with the same pain as before, for another hour until Andi gave me some serious strong medicine that crushed the pain. Never have I cried over bodily problems before- it was some pretty brutal stomach agony. Alisha had the same pain as well, but on a lesser scale, and we think it was the jicama that we ate the night before, because our bodies aren’t accustomed to it and it’s full of fiber. Barf.
                at 12, I was doing okay, and we set out to evangelize in Cholula, my team being me Andi and Lalo (seriously a good matchup- we’re all relaxed and down for whatever comes our way). Our main focus was to first pray for words of prophecy/encouragement for people, and approach the people with the words, initiating conversation and sharing them. We weren’t having a ton of luck receiving anything, but we wound up talking to a candy street vendor for 30 minutes, well he was actually talking to us, about how above everything else in life we need to love Christ. It was neat, because a lot of it was what we’d been covering in class- dying to yourself and your worldly desires to grow in and glorify Christ. We prayed for a couple other street vendors, then talked to a lady who had been in the business of making and selling handmade jewelry for fifteen years, alongside her family. She said she was blessed to be doing what she loved, because she liked to create things with her hands and converse with passerbys as well. We asked if we could pray for her, and she said of course, and she talked about the strong place God held in her life. It was really encouraging.
                we took a bus on the way back, not entirely sure of where our stop for EV was. We were sposed to preach to everyone on the bus, but decided to find one person to talk and pray with. So there was a lady sitting infront of us, with a seat open, but I was scared to clamor over her to sit at her side :P, so we just started conversation, asking her what she was knitting. Then Andi asked her where she was getting off, and where we should get off, and then asked if there was something we could pray for her for. She said yes, her fourteen-year-old Yessica was in the hospital with an illness. So we prayed for her, and then Lalo explained to her about La Viña and Esperanza Viva and what we were doing, and we all talked about that. Then a man sitting behind her started to speak to me, in English, asking where I was from, telling me he’d lived in New York for awhile, working to send money to his family back in Mexico, and how it was a struggle to pick up English. I said it was the same for me for Spanish, haha. He asked about how I liked Mexico, the food and the weather, and told me how neat it was to use his English again. Then Lalo started talking to him in Spanish, telling him it was cool that he knew English, and the man replied to Lalo in ENGLISH. We were laughing so hard after we got off the bus, because Lal had no idea what the man was saying- he was just nodding his head and smiling. Lalo was like “I asked him a question, Mexican to Mexican, and he answers me in ENGLISH!!” Anyways, so we said goodbye to our new friends and stepped out onto the dirtroad, unknowingly way too soon before the exit we should’ve taken, and walked for a good half hour back to the orphanage. This, my friends, is the kind of adventure I really enjoy- talking to people you cross paths with, the three of us interacting as a team with others, supporting each other and taking our sweet time. It was lovely, and we were all refreshed to the fact that God puts the right people in our path who need us to share part of our lives with them.