Women and children

This morning we woke up early again. After a short breakfast we headed out to the church of a man who had done first year the same year as our trip leader Joaquin. We spent some time just playing with the kids for a while and then it was time for lunch even though it was still in the morning. After our team did the drama they took the children outside and left the mother's in the church building (it's roof was palm branches and the walls were tarps).

Eventually it got so hot in there that they took off one of the walls to let a little bit of a breeze in. After the first of our three speakers they saw 5 people get healed with nobody laying hands on them! Then after the final speaker 5 of the women gave their lives to Christ! Our gals then felt that they should wash the feet of the women. So they lined up and all had their feet washed by the girls on our team.

Our Children's ministry did much of the same activities that they had done at the orphanage and had their own healing service as well. When it was time for us to go all of the women and children got together with our team for a photo. It was amazing to see how God had knit our hearts together when we came to serve them in love.

After going to our host church to change we headed out to the beach. Although there are some beaches that are very close to where we were, our hosts took us a little further away to go to a very nice beach that had a view of Holy Spirit Island (yes, you read that correctly, many cities there have religious names as they were founded by Christians and never conquered by foreign militaries...La Paz means "The Peace" and we had stopped for ice cream in Todos Santos, or "All Saints").

The beach was gorgeous. Rather than wearing myself out in the water and out in the sun I just stayed in the shade under one of the little things they had. I have no idea what they are called but are like having a big umbrella but the shade is created again by palm branches. I just sat there and soaked for most of time only stopping to eat some snacks and take a few photos.

We went out to dinner with all of our hosts and afterwards went to get ice cream down by the boardwalk. I must say that their strawberry ice cream is the greatest ice cream of all time! Then before we left the translator who had just given his life to Christ the night before shared with us how moved he was by how we treated the women this morning. He never would have expected us to not only love them how we did, but to also treat them like royalty. The love of God did the trick.