Day 5: We're (past) halfway there...livin' on a prayer

“My grace is sufficient for your, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that the power of Christ my rest upon me.” – 2 Corinthians 12:9

 

I woke up and felt weak, and so God gave me this verse that ran through my head all day and strengthened me to complete the day, I know that without God I would not have made it through today.

 

There wasn’t anything necessarily different about today, it was just a long one. Just over halfway through the trip and we are all tired, it’s hard to sleep outside your own bed. It’s always hard to push through the halfway point, but I think we all made and are refueled and refreshed, or at least should be by tomorrow morning.

 

The layout of the day was much like that of yesterday, with the same people going the same places. So Brian, Robbie, James and I went with the same Iowa kids today back to Issachar Community to finish what we had started yesterday.

 

I’ll put it this way, it was the longest, hardest day of painting I’ve ever experienced and James and I agree that we don’t want to see another paintbrush for a long time.
However the good news is that we finished the front of the building and it looks great. So we are all done with Issachar.

 

I painted a ton of trim today, so I was up on a ladder almost the entire day. I won’t go into detail about it because my Mother might not appreciate it….okay I’ll tell you. I was dangerously painting two stories above concrete, but I’ll leave it at that and the fact that I’m okay right now and able to blog makes it okay. The worst part was when I was stretching out and balancing but don’t worry, it never got too bad…

 

I think all of us experienced a little bit of disappointment at what we did today though. I know for Brian and I we both shared feelings of,  “We came all the way to Denver to paint a brick building, we could do this in Missoula.”

 

During the last two days when thoughts like this came up, I constantly reminded myself that we were doing exactly what God wanted us to do, and that helped me greatly and I had a great time painting today despite being wiped out by it.

 

We left at about three to go back to the church to shower, (the boy’s shower was fixed!) and rest a little bit before tonight’s schedule.

 

There was a type of choir something or other going on tonight at the church, so we (our Missoula group) decided to go out to eat at Casa Bonita, which without going into too much detail was the sweetest restaurant I’ve ever been too! It was incredible! The best food there were the fried sopaipillas covered in honey, of which I ate 9. I just couldn’t stop. Dude that’s a lot of sopaipillas and I’m feeling it for sure, but it was worth it without a doubt. I love those things!

 

After dinner we headed back to the Joshua Station to do day number two of our VBS and so we all got to hang out with our favorite kids, namely Hosea and Marcos. Those guys are nuts. I feel bad for them because they just need males in their life. They are two of several brothers with a single mom and they just don’t get enough male love in the form of older brothers and a father. Those kids are sweet though, tons of energy.

 

 Robbie, James, Josh (a sweet kid from Iowa) and I went outside near the end of VBS when it was in control to play some basketball. The moment we stepped on the court two guys showed up wanting to play, and soon after that another kid came out to play. They were all super nice, and really fun to play with. Josh wouldn’t miss though so my team lost, but it was so much fun to play with them. Valentino (we all called him Tino), Lucas, and Daniel were their names, pray for them, we’re planning to play again on Thursday and I hope we get a chance to talk to them about Christ.

 

Please pray for the groups here, we’re having some tension caused by exhaustion between our group and also the other groups are having some problems.

 

Please pray for, Daniel, Tino, Lucas, Hosea, Marcos and the others we hung out with today.

 

Please pray for our ministry tomorrow as it will be more hands on, and with people and as John put it “the edge heats up”. I’m excited and a little nervous.

 

Finally, pray that we would all be able to get the massive amounts of paint off of our bodies and that we’d get a good night’s sleep, we all need it.