They had breakfast at our house each day and then closed the day either with dinner out or food ordered in at the Lumppios, followed by a time of Bible study and sharing. Their days here were completely jam packed!
Friday morning they were off to the neighborhoods in La Cruz to deliver invitations and tracts to the people they met. They were inviting people to the municipal plaza to see them perform a drama, a puppet show and sing hymns and choruses in Spanish.
Later in the day they got all set up in the plaza and started to draw a crowd almost immediately, Nate deftly prepared balloon critters that delighted kids and cops alike!
They did a fine job with their performance, which was followed by a salvation message delivered by Pastor Jose. It was all so well received and the crowd had grown so much by the end that they decided to run through the whole thing again!
At the very end they also offered free face painting to the kids and entertained them all by blowing bubbles while they were waiting in line, giving the rest of us more time to speak with as many people as we could. We also ended up attracting a local dance team that was getting ready to practice in the plaza, so we had a good crowd of teens! Nice cross-generational mix! The kids did such an awesome job and through both performances they attracted about 150 people! One of the kids was giving the bust of Miguel Hidalgo a bath while he waited for his family!
Saturday brought a repeat, as we canvassed the neighborhoods of Ceuta, inviting them to the church later in the day for the performances. The kids did a great job, adding crafts to the mix here as well as the balloon critters, face painting, bubbles and their fine performances. The salvation message was issued by Pastor Ismael. There were more than 60 children and more than a few adults and teens in attendance. It was an awesome time. Lidia was able to have an extended talk with some of the former youth group members and was encouraged by their response to her invitation to return to church. Please keep that in prayer!
Sunday, they attended and participated in church services here in La Cruz and in Ceuta, giving everyone more time to interact with people they’d met in the previous days. It was a completely blessed time.
And, no, we didn’t work them totally to death the whole time they were here! There was time for afternoon rest, shopping in our downtown and at the MZ. They explored the myriad of Mexican snack foods. The discovered the joy of agua frescas.
We even worked in a visit or two to Playa Ceuta!
They sampled some of the local cuisine at our favorite restaurants and had some meals with Pastor Jose and his wife and with the church in Ceuta.
We got them on the bus this morning for Mazatlan, where they will rejoin the rest of their team and minister there for a couple more days before returning home. We will miss them!! They were such a pleasure to host and a joy to be around. They worked together so beautifully even though it was the first mission trip for many of them.
They were a blessed break in our routines of learning language and culture too! They left us with many wonderful goodies from crafts to medicines to bibles, tracts, gospels of John and they also brought us chocolate chips, graham crackers and Jiffy corn muffin mixes! Woohoo! These are great folks that enriched our lives as we interacted with them. Their impact will be felt in our communities for a long time to come. Thank you MVFLC and thank you Jesus for sending these folks to La Cruz and Ceuta!
No comments:
Post a Comment