His Place Construction Outreach

Ok, sorry I haven't posted in a little while. We've been busy with a team from Washington state. They came from His Place Church in Mt. Vernon, WA to do construction on our new central church facility a few blocks away! This construction project started almost a year ago exactly, and it's so exciting to see it taking such form and shape already!!! It's really a huge undertaking, but our God is SO MUCH BIGGER!

Anyway, this team usually comes down every year and does nothing but construction. A few years ago, they came down and started building the Arrayanes church. They are hard workers and accomplish a ton of stuff in short amounts of time! This week they poured the platform floor and stairs; they built the instrument storage room up to the the first "dala" (it's like a concrete beam or something); they leveled about 25% of the sanctuary floor (which is slightly larger than a full-sized basketball court); they extended the re-bar columns on the property wall to their full height; they uprooted and moved several trees to their permanent locations; and two guys took a ton of steel pieces and welded them together to form our massive front gates (complete with man-door); which was installed by the time they left!!!

The greatest part of it all was that the entire week they worked side-by-side with folks from the local churches here: men, women, and even non-church members alike! Even I helped on the construction: shoveling for the mixing of concrete, wetting bricks that were being laid as part of the walls for the instrument storage room, and making steel re-bar cages for the wall cage extensions. I even helped load the massive gates onto the truck that transported them to the church! This project is cool enough as it is, but it's going to be even more phenomenal when it's done and we can each of us, Mexican and American and Canadian, walk around that facility and say, "hey, I helped build this wall!" or "I helped pour this very floor!", or "I helped pour the very platform that He's teaching me from!" What an incredible and tangible way to understand what it is to grab hold of the prize, to press on toward the goal, to take hold of our faith and walk forward in it! Wow, God is good!

The first Sunday that the team was here, they attended both services: in Cofradia and in Arrayanes. Then after the service in Arrayanes, they provided a wonderful meal of Taco soup for them to have a chance to fellowship with that church body. This team has built wonderful relationships with the church body in Arrayanes especially, so it was a really precious time of fellowship and catching up! And it was a ton of fun too!!

The team also went up to Mojocuautla on that Friday to be part of the Bible study ministry there. It was neat to be a translator for that. That is still a pretty tough job for me..translating that is. But even though I'm terrified every time I have to do it, it's just way cool when it all comes out well!

One morning during the week, I even did the unthinkable. Yup, I got up before sunrise! I accompanied three guys and one of the young ladies on a hike up the Cofradia Hill to watch the sunrise. From this hill you can see the entire town of Cofradia as well as all the way to the mountain in Penas, which is about 20 minutes from Cofradia by truck. It was a glorious morning as we welcomed the dawn and then hiked back down the hill to a wonderful breakfast and a day of hard but gratifying work! Praise the Lord for the glories of his creation!

The town of Cofradia from "The Hill". I live just a block or so above the first red roof you see. :)..just to the right of the radio tower!

The sunrise that glorious morning!

At the end of the week, the team went for Tacos in Pilas. There is a man there who has a popular taco stand on the weekends. Last year and this year he opened his home and made tacos exclusively for this team during the week (which he doesn't normally do). The team took probably about 20-30 people from the church with them, so were probably about 60-70 people total! It was SUCH A BLAST!!! Everyone had a good time talking and eating their fill! When it was all over, we at 660 tacos total, and the record from last year was broken for the one person who ate the most tacos. Last year it was 23, and one of our own youth broke the record by eating 24!!! Talk about big eaters!! But we had a wonderful night. I had the priveledge of sitting at a table with Sandy and Mili and one of the young ladies from the team. We had a good time joking around and eating good food.

What a marvelous outreach this team has had in this area. The people here KNOW them, and they look forward to spending time with them. They consider this team precious friends and brothers and sisters in Christ. What a great time of work and fellowship in the Lord this week and a half has been. We're definitely looking forward to next year!