I am going to be brief with my daily recap today to get to a greater message that I want to talk about. 8-bro-uno got off to a late start again today which resulting in missing breakfast and the much talked about fresh jugo de maro (blackberry juice). We made it to lobby to find everyone dressed to the 9's (may or may not have used that correctly) in their church attire. Took a nice stroll to the Iglesia Biblica Christiana de Guayaquil where we attended church. The church was very sweet in welcoming us all. The majority of the team took seats in the back but a few of us thinking we could actually follow the sermon, bravely sat in front. I loved taking part in the worship as we sang some new worship songs and then a few that were familiar but translated to Spanish such as "Mighty to Save" and "How Great is Our God." It was so awesome to praise God with a community of people on the other side of the world. The sermon started and I was able to hold my own for about the first half hour, understanding about 80% of the message. But after he kept going, I was soon lost and just turned to nodding occasionally and reading the Bible that Courtney brought. This is where my story will get hazy because I could go on and on but I will direct you to my amiga Jenna's blog at http://jennareallyspeaking.blogspot.com/ for a full recap of the day.
We concluded the night with prayer and praise. During this time we were told our ministry teams, with which one will go to ESPOL and the other will go to Universidad de Guayaquil for sharing the gospel each week. My team consists of: Helen, Ashley, Hannah, Megan and then Jess, Chris and Andrea who will be floaters between both campuses since they are part of staff. I am really excited for what tomorrow will bring as it is our first official day sharing on the campuses. So as you read this, keep our team in your prayers :) and a blog post about our experiences can surely be expected for tomorrow. Finally I have reached the main part that I have been wanting to post about. As you can imagine, a lot of spiritual thinking gets done throughout the day while I am here as I engage in conversations with my teammates and spend quiet time in the Bible. I wanted to try and externalize some of those thoughts through the blog, the first having a theme of Father's Day. Multiple posts may start to get posted each day to give some separation between my thoughts. Well here it goes...
I wanted to touch upon my gratitude to the greatest father of all....my Father and God. As I was processing my thoughts about how our spiritual conversations might go tomorrow, I was compiling a list of Bible verses that would come in handy, a lot of which are already included in the booklets.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him." John 3:16-17
Our God loves us all soooo much. Our Father took the punishment for something that we did. He created us to love Him, we turned away and yet He still chose to love us after all the pain we caused Him. For some mind blowing stuff, read Genesis 15 as God makes a covenant with Abraham. God walked through twice announcing his future payment for our sins. There aren't even enough adjectives to go on describing the awesomeness that God is. God is my role model. I am striving to live my life for what he calls us to be. We say it is impossible to live up to all that he commands us to be because he can't possible understand the temptations of sin. But he sent Jesus to be that walking role model. He faced every bit of temptation we do and then some but never once faltered. Yes we will never be able to reach full perfection but our steps should be in the footsteps of our Father. So in light of Father's day, thank you God for leading the way and guiding me in my actions. And thank you for your never ending, unconditional love.
I understand that must have come across as a crazy tangent, which is generally how my thought process works but hopefully as I start writing it all out more, there will be more structure to my thought process.
Ciao :)
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