Bendiciones are blessings and I hope to share some of those that I brought back from Ecuador in the trials and sweetnesses of our design trip. I looked over the names from the project poster I put up, and was reminded of each person those names represent - a brother or a sister I now know and will look forward to meeting again.
As our plane was landing in Ecuador, a wave of thoughts hit me and one of those was that from the air, Quito looked nothing like I thought Latin America should look. It looked surprisingly similar to rural Germany or Switzerland, the mountainside outlined with the lines of pines that mark farm boundries. Secondly, I though, I'm really far from home. But I felt as at home as I did in Georgetown, Texas. I dearly miss beloved friends and family, but I felt no farther from my brothers and sisters than when we would go our separate ways about Georgetown. I felt as near to the ones I love as I wold shortly after saying goodbye. In a song, Rich Mullins says to God "I am home anywhere, if you are where I am," and the reality of that hit me really warmly when we landed. The Holy Spirit is with us always, and is such a uniting force that neither distance nor silence can break the unity of God's house, for its mortar is God's everlasting Spirit, and it's bricks are his persevering saints.
Upon leaving the airport, we were immediately introduced to this couple
Daniel and Ana Gonzales,
the faithful directors of WOL Quito, Ecuador
Israel, whom he and his wife are expecting their first child in a month. It's a son!
And José Rosales, whom we all called Pocho (Dan and I are the only ones who got his real name)
Daniel and Ana testify by their joy to the sweetness of God's presence, whose tenderness, mercy, and hospitality all are manifest in their blessed marriage. God's faithfulness has deepened their joy through their gut-wrenching journies. Pocho and Daniel are both Argentine. Ana is Columbian and God introduced them all through Word of Life, and married Daniel and Ana before moving them to Quito Ecuador about 22 years ago. I got to ride with Israel from the airport in his vintage VW bug, and we spoke like brothers who had just met. God's spirit is an awesome family maker. And Pocho never took off that devious, joyful smile, and filled our time with endless good humor.
In interacting with the leaders, it was evident that God litters the ground these people walk with the fruit of His Spirit that they carry, and it was a joy to give them an awesome camp design in exactly the way they wanted. My job was to run the rod for Stuart, one of the two Surveyors. Without boring you, surveying works by the communication between an instrument with a 3-D 360 degree swiveling head that measures the direct distance between it and a prism on a rod. Using angles, trig, and subtracting the height of the rod and the instrument, it can pinpoint the relative location and height of each point. You move this rod around to blanket the site and develop a contour map of this very steep site. What this means for me as the rod-man is that I walked places I never thought should be plausible for a man to go. This picture was taken at eye level,
After completing our work, we spent a day experiencing Quito. We visited "La Mitad del Mundo" (the middle of the world), a museum dedicated to the equator. Afterward, we ate at a pizza shop in Old Town, Quito and visited the Ecuador White House. We couldn't go inside cause we were foreigners. But we did get to explore the towers of the Basilica del Voto Nacional in Quito.
A couple more photos, from the campsite, this is our team minus Eric. The next one is under a bamboo bunch that was about 50 feet tall and each stalk was wider than a football. The flowers are from La Mitad del Mundo.
God is beautiful. He has since the ancient days revealed himself to man through his creation, and Ecuador is an exceptional example to his manifest beauty. On Wednesday I got sick, and as I was told, sickness can be an attack on us cause when I was sick I wanted nothing to do but try and sleep, all the while neglecting to foster my relationship with the Holy Spirit. I neglected the ultimate healer of all sickness, and as I did, I felt more sick both physically and spiritually as the week continued until I started to bounce back from my infirmities. I woke up from a few days of lying in pain and not being myself, realizing how connected physical and spiritual health really are. So I want yall to pray for me to grow in intimacy with God through sickness, which has already hit me more in the past three weeks than it did in the previous three years. But mostly Pray that I would sit in God's presence in prayer at all times, fully open and interacting with His Spirit. If you pray this for me, it could possibly be more effective than any other prayer. I bless God for each one of you, your prayers and love, and may His light shine upon you to reflect His beauty to the world
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