Another amazing day here in El Salvador. Wonderful day in the heat. All are hanging in there…a little heat exhaustion, but nothing a great nights sleep won’t help. The students were amazing again today. We took a trip back out to Los Heroes for a children’s sunday school program and to see our roofs from yesterday…all 7 families had a dry night’s sleep for the first time.
Then to Los Angeles II to pray for a church plant and it’s pastors. Pastor Alba and her husband have given up their homes to live in the Los Angeles community to be there for the church. They reach mostly children showing them love and compassion that they don’t receive at home. This was such an amazing couple. Then to El Retorno up a mountain-beautiful scenery, to have a service with Pastor Daniel there. He has been faithful in service reaching all that would come. This community was mostly catholic or witches and so his Christian congregation was averaging about 60. Today 200+ people showed up and raised this pastor’s spirits. He and his family were so grateful, with tears in their eyes they asked when Kenton would be back so they could give him a chicken. Never had this community been so attentive to a church service before. We had all for corners of an intersection full of people and had to split our team to do the program on all sides…God showed up and many were prayed for for healing and 4 (that we know of) prayed the sinners prayer and have given their lives to Jesus! We distributed seeds and rice at the end along with shoes for the Dads for Father’s day…very big win for this community.
I’m overcome with the changes of heart that I have seen in our young people. We talked tonight in our debriefing devotion on how ‘real’ these people are. Johnnie, one of our students had been talking-using the figure of speech- ie: “They just bite into that mango cause they are so real” or “Oscar, our bus driver, can make it up a winding mountain road because he is so real”. Funny, but it got us thinking about how authentic these people really are. They have no luxuries to hide behind, or material things to place in front of things they are dealing with. They are real. And God’s joy is real in them. May we carry this realness with us…be truly genuinely in love with our creator…the same creator that created these ‘real’ people. Continue to pray, tomorrow will be a challenging day of ministry. We are going out to many schools in the heat. Pray for continued protection over us and for God’s joy to keep pushing us over the threshold of weariness! 🙂
Oak and Pines 