Week three

This last week of my Discipleship Training School was amazing. The subject of the classes was the Father Heart of God. He did some amazing things in my life through everything that happened this week. He has really been showing me a lot about who He is and who I am. He has been really pruning me over the last couple weeks to make me more like Him. This week was a lot easier on me as I think I am getting into the swing of things and the rhythm of life here on the base. God has really been showing up in this time. On Friday I got the opportunity to go to the red light district during the day to do some ministry. It was an amazing experience. We went around the area led by someone from the colonia (Spanish for neighborhood) making house calls and praying for people in that rather poor, rough part of town. When we finally got back to the house we had left from, the children were out front playing so we all started playing with them. As we were Michael (one of the leaders and translators on the base) came outside and told us there was one more person we needed to pray for. We went into the house and found a woman crying and were told her husband had left her and that she had three children. As they continued talking with her I gathered from my limited Spanish that she had started using drugs to help deal with the pain and that she was actually on drugs at the time. She had fallen away from the faith and had started having questions whether or not God still loved her or if He existed at all. Through much prayer and many tears she eventually repented ad came to Christ with her pains.

Today I had the opportunity to go to a small pueblo (Spanish for village) outside of Mazatlan called La Quelite. It took about an hour and a half to get there in a truck-taxi (that's right, here they have taxis where you basically sit on benches in the back of a truck with a cover over it) to get there, but it was worth it. It was a small village in the mountains where things seemed to be very slow-paced and quiet, a nice change of pace from the city. It was a lot of fun to walk around the town and see the simpler way of life the people there live. We had the opportunity to climb to the top of a mountain where there was a shrine to the patron saint of lost causes. The view from there was spectacular! Probably my favorite experience from the excursion was when we all decided to take a ride on some donkeys and horses that were there with their owners in the middle of town. Everyone got on their animal, leaving me with the last pick. I looked around and found the last available animal, a small boy's worn out, sorry looking, tiny donkey. There are some hilarious photos of me on that poor little burro. Overall it was a very good, relaxing day.