ewwww......

A picture is worth a thousand words.....

Teleférico/Bye Sarah...

A week or so ago the team took it's final outing together as a whole.....Mérida is home to the highest cable car (teleférico) in the world. I have actually been on it before (with my summer project) and so I got to enjoy a second trip up the mountain (to Pico Espejo). It was pretty cold at the top! The trip up to the final station....
The team nestled in a rock....
It's a little chilly up there!

It was our last team outing because Sarah left us this week as she is headed back to the states to re-raise her support for next year. Our dearest Maracuchan will also be departing from us shortly as she is headed back to her beloved Maracaibo to raise support as well. Both of them will be working with the team in Caracas next year. Please pray for them as they raise support! The other 4 of us will be continuing on with ministry as usual for now :) and making the most of our last 2 months in this beautiful city.

www.freerice.com

it's cool. and good "waste" of time.

Religious

"I believe that the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man's mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God....." - excerpted from Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, pg 13

Christmas in May?

Ok so this post may be another one mostly for my mom...but just in case there are any other artsy/craftsy types out there (like my mom and I) I thought I'd share that I finally finished the winter crossstitch I had started in September. (I ran out of white thread in December) and had to have it shipped to Venezuela....I finally got it at the end of April and was able to finish.....Only 5 months too late, or 7 months too early for Christmas :)

P.S. This is my 100th post! I was hoping to have something more exciting to write about, but I've been in bed sick with the flu for 4 days and don't have much energy, let alone excitement :S Hopefully something more exciting will be coming soon....stay tuned :)

Mothers are Wonderful Things

Happy Mother's Day to all you beautiful Mothers out there:) I know that there are definitely some that read this blog, and to each of you I wish you days filled with joy and hopes that those you love are close enough to hug today....

On that note...I am not within hugging distance of my mom, nor of my grandmothers. :( This is one of the days it's really hard to be in another country. So in lieu of that I am writing them a shout-out in this way, to say Thank You for being in my life.

Mom....thank you for being who you are. Thank you for reading the Little House books over and over when we were younger. Thanks for letting us toilet paper our own house, just to have fun at a slumber party. Thanks for my surprise 8th grade graduation cake. Thanks for always being the mom who showed up for everything in school. Thanks for making my costumes - princess, ballerina, Mary Ingalls....and helping with booktalks and dioramas, Thanks for letting me watch Grease when I got my braces on. Thanks for sending me many more care packages than any of the other kids ever got. Thanks for coming to Seattle when I broke my foot, and taking care of me, even though I should be old enough to take care of myself by now. Thank you for letting me come to Venezuela, no matter how scared you were. Mom, you've always been there when I needed you. More than anything, thank you for not letting me go when things are hard. I love you and I miss you sooo much.








Grandma Jean....Thank you for always always being faithful. Thank you for coming to every swim meet or tennis match or band concert. Thank you for letting us help decorate your house for the holidays. Thanks for letting me help with the lasagna or sugar cookies or...divinity!! Haha.Thanks for being silly with us sometimes and putting up with all our teasing. Thank you so much for supporting me to come to Venezuela, even though I know it was not exactly what you were expecting me to do with my life :) Thanks for your emails, and more importantly thank you for your prayers. I love you, and I miss you so much.


Grandma Sal - Thank you so much for being fabulous :) Thank you for birthday cards and Christmas cards and presents. Thank you for taking me shopping and to the beach. Thanks for letting us jump on you to wake up in the morning. Thanks for making the best pot roast and meatloaf! Thanks for buying the little boxes of cereal and bottles of apple juice. Thanks for being beautiful and stylish and encouraging us to be the same. Thank you so much for being my beautiful grandmother, I love you and miss you so much.








You all mean the world to me! I will be home in 80 short days! Wishing you the happiest of happy Mother's days :)

P.S. Special shout-out as well to Beth Coonts, who I've become aware reads this blog. I've never met you, but your daughter and I have spent many hours comparing how much we miss our mothers and telling anecdotes of you two. I'm sure I'll meet you someday...until then, Happy Mother's Day, God Bless :)

"Everything"

Tonight, I was witness to a "drama" about Christ and how much He fights for us, basically. It brought me to tears, thinking about how much the Lord chose to suffer for us, and how hard He fights for us now....the song that went with is was "Everything" by Lifehouse....I guess I had never really thought about the lyrics before now, but they really touched my heart....here they are for you, I encourage you to read them and/or buy the song off of itunes, it's worth it :)

Find Me Here
Speak To Me
I want to feel you
I need to hear you
You are the light
That's leading me
To the place where I find peace again.

You are the strength, that keeps me walking.
You are the hope, that keeps me trusting.
You are the light to my soul.
You are my purpose...you're everything.

How can I stand here with you and not be moved by you?
Would you tell me how could it be any better than this?

You calm the storms, and you give me rest.
You hold me in your hands, you won't let me fall.
You steal my heart, and you take my breath away.
Would you take me in? Take me deeper now?

How can I stand here with you and not be moved by you?
Would you tell me how could it be any better than this?
And how can I stand here with you and not be moved by you?
Would you tell me how could it be any better than this?

Cause you're all I want, You're all I need
You're everything,everything
You're all I want your all I need
You're everything, everything.
You're all I want you're all I need.
You're everything, everything
You're all I want you're all I need, you're everything, everything.

And How can I stand here with you and not be moved by you?
Would you tell me how could it be any better than this?
How can I stand here with you and not be moved by you?
Would you tell me how could it be any better than this?

How can I stand here with you and not be moved by you?
Would you tell me how could it be any better than this?

*Please Lord, I want to be moved by You......there's truly nothing better than this. You are Everything*

Curacao

For our third and final VISA renewal trip, we went to a small island off the coast of VZ called Curacao it is one of the "ABC" islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao) all part of the Dutch Antilles. Interestingly for that reason - the most common language is Dutch! Followed by Papiamento (a mix of a native language, English, Dutch, and Spanish), then Spanish and finally English. Actually most of the English that was spoken was very limited, and we found it easier to communicate in Spanish (our now second language, as we are all pretty much capable of the language). Mostly, despite HORRIBLE, and I do truly mean that delays, cancelations and all around travel nightmares....we spent 4 days in Curacao relaxing, exploring, and eating some good food - prepping for the last three months of ministry. I've posted photo albums with pics from Caracas and Curacao....but I'll put up a few here with captions so you can see a tid bit of the experience :)

We were amused by the translation on this card, please no "spindling"

The cute little bungalow which was our home for our trip.

Who would want to buy this shampoo?! Eek!

The car we rented was REALLY tiny for the 4 of us!

Just a cool view of some downtown stores....

The girls, on the floating bridge.

Oddly enough, Curacao is home to an ostrich farm!

It's also home to an African restaurant....featuring Ostrich plates....I had a wrap....tastes like beef!

You might think this is silly, but there was a DENNYS in Curacao and we got super exited for American food! (especially after the ostrich meat!)

There are big lizards everywhere!

We got to visit the "Hato Caves" that were carved out by the ocean.

"Hato Caves" - slaves used to hide here and do religious services where their masters wouldn't find out. Cool!

The beaches, of course, were gorgeous!

Our last night we got dressed up and went to a nice dinner....the restaurant was on the ocean and we got to watch the waves crashing as we ate, it was a cool experience :)

Well I think that's all folks....It was a great trip of course, but I'm glad to be back in beautiful Merida and looking forward to our last three months of ministry here. Please keep us in your prayers!

We are ONE body

This is rather random, but I wanted to share one incident of our travels last week that was seemingly insignificant at the time, but has truly stuck with me.....

After our time with the national team working in Caracas, we had one extra day and night in Caracas (we = me, Amanda, Eben, and Elissa - from the Maracaibo team) before we headed out to the island of Curacao (right off the coast of VZ) for our final VISA renewal trip...don't worry, some of those stories are yet to come....Anyway, this story actually begins on the very first day we flew into Venezuela from Atlanta.....

On our entry flight, we were all separated into different seats in various areas of the plane. Eben was fortunate enough to end up sitting next to a missionary couple from New Tribes Missions (really cool missions organization, check em out!). This staff couple chatted with Eben and shared a little of their experiences and such with mission work. They were also kind enough to give him the name and address of a couple who live in Caracas and own a "missionary guest house". At this guest house, any missionary can stay the night, or several if needed, for only $25 (US) a night, with breakfast provided, and the house is only 2 blocks away from the airport, and there is an on-call taxi driver for any hour of the day...This place turned out to be an incredible blessing for us...not only was it cheap, close to the airport, safe, and comfortable, but the people were so encouraging to me.

First of all, we met Jim and his wife (oops forgot her name :S) who were taking care of the house. They are actually not the owners, but are watching it for a few months while the owners are back in the states for health reasons. Jim and his wife and their kids had served in the Amazonas region of Venezuela (pretty much just wild jungle) with a native tribe. While there they had basically constructed a written language for the tribe. Unfortunately before they were able to begin translating the bible into the tribal language, Chavez sent his army in to kick all the missionaries out of the jungle, and burn all of their belongings, and then stationed guards at the tribe with order to shoot any "gringos" that came back there. Needless to say, they ended up at the "missionary guest house" on their way back to the states to try and figure out what to do next....It was so incredible to listen to the stories of these people. I mean really...sometimes I feel like I'm really having a hard time for the God here in Venezuela (ie: parasites, no milk/flour/meat, riots, etc....) but it was amazing to hear all the things that these people had gone through to bring the gospel.....it sure helped give me some perspective!!

Secondly, we got to meet a guy named David. Now, David was from Tennesee and you could tell that from the moment he opened his mouth and tumbling out came a heavy accent, and very chipper tone. David rolled in at about 5:00 AM as we were all sitting in the living room (as to why we were all awake at that time...that story will come with the stories of travel adventures/nightmares at some later date) Anyway, from the moment David entered the room you could sense the Holy Spirit on him. Before he had known us for an hour, he has already launched into a sermon on the power of prayer, and told us all about this new prayer method that he and his church and his missions organization (Genesis something...) were promoting. It was pretty much impossible not to be inspired by the way that he talked and how passionate he was about prayer and serving the Lord. He was in Caracas to do a giant outreach with many churches together down there....only later on did we find out that he was one of the main speakers for the event. We sat and listened and chatted with David for at least 4 or 5 hours (again, travel stories come later...) and in that time I found myself so encouraged by the faith of this man and for his heart for fellow Christians to be called to pray. One more coincidence....David told us that he was only staying at the guest house while he waited for his translator to fly in....well, his translator's taxi pulled up to the house as our haphazard group was finally about to leave, and it turned out to be none other than someone we know from Merida! Ladimiro (the translator) was also the ex-pastor at Nueva Vida (a church we attend), he also owns our apartment, and teaches at English at ULA! What a small world??! We was very surprised to see us, as we were him, getting out of the taxi....but somehow it wasn't weird, just a God thing :)

Finally, we got to meet another missionary couple Terry and his wife (sorry, I guess I'm bad with wife's names!) who were also from the South (Alabama I think) and were also in town for some sort of outreach. I didn't get to speak to them as much, but did get to hear a little about the story of their marriage and their heart for Venezuela in general. Mostly I just enjoyed being present as David and Terry bounced ideas off of each other and shared visions.

It was a blessing for me to be in the presence of older and stronger Christians. That is something we have really been lacking this year, and I didn't realize how much I missed that until very recently. Because my team is only 6 people my age, we really all have about the same amount of life experience and can't really speak into each others' lives the way an older Christian can. As we finally grabbed out luggage and headed for the door to catch our taxi, David, Terry and his wife jumped up and asked to pray for us. I was so blessed by this simple act of 3 complete strangers, that it really made me think. It was so cool for me to think about, and realize that even though we all came from different mission organizations and churches, with different objectives and goals....we all truly serve the same God and we all truly want to see His great commission fulfilled. We are all ONE body. There's no competition, there's no hierarchy of organizations or denominations....we are just Christians, committed to loving the same God, and He is Good!

Caracas Outreach

Well folks I apologize for the neglect of this blog as of late...I attribute it to 2 things: 1). As usual, life is busy and 2). I believe I'm beginning to lose my use of the English language, and therefore writing has become more difficult than I remember it......The latter, while sounding laughable, is unfortunately truer by the day...I realized the other day that writing here more frequently would counteract these symptoms, so I am returning to the land of blogdom. Unfortunately, since it has been a while I can't remember much to report except for the rather scattered and busy events of the last two weeks.....The most exciting of which was our trip to, and time spent in Caracas.

Caracas is the capital, and largest, city in Venezuela. It is also one of the most dangerous cities in the world....But don't mind that, we all returned safe and sound, and I truly enjoyed my time in Caracas. We, (all of the CCC staff in VZ) came together for a few days to so a "blitz" of the city of Caracas. The ministry of Vida Estudiantil has just this year been "started" in Caracas. Unfortunately due to the
small number of staff, already been spread thin through the country, there is only one couple and their 2 year old daughter serving the ministry and trying to get it off the ground in Caracas. Try as they might, 2 people against a city of 5 million...is a big challenge for anyone. So, in an effort to give the movement a little push in the right direction, we all came together for a time of concentrated work in Caracas on the campuses there. We visited UCV (Universidad Central de Venezuela) the largest university in Venezuela at roughly 70,000 students as well as Simon Bolivar University, a private university with around 30,000 students. We all split into pairs and went sharing the gospel (through the use of the 4 Spiritual Laws), as well as asking students to fill out surveys, and sharing with them what Vida Estudiantil is and what they stand for. We invited each student we talked to, to a large outreach at the end of our time called "Why do we need God?"

Sharing in Caracas was a different experience than sharing in Merida. Caracas being a huuuuuge city (in fact, at times it even reminded me of Seattle) students are much more liberal (as is typical with large cities) and less willing to take time out of their busy schedules to chat with foreigners (who are also more common in the big city). I noticed that I was stared at significantly less most of the time....Almost every Venezuelan was amused at my antics when trying to board the Metro (subway system) however. I wasn't aware that PUSHING and shoving and tripping are pretty much required to earn yourself a spot aboard the train...but I found out quickly! Everything in Caracas was fast-moving and hurried, similar to the US actually. This made sharing with students more difficult as most were in a hurry to get somewhere and didn't have time to stop and chat. However, the Lord still blessed us with many many good conversations and we saw quite a few students accept Christ. I just wrote about the whole event in my prayer letter so I'm going to let you read that for the rest of the info...look forward to the April newsletter headed your way in a matter of days!