Snack Tables, Stucco, And Everything In Between

I've never done the mission trip thing before this. To be honest there were only really two reasons for this

A.) even just the prospect of not showering for a day makes my hair start to grease like a wicked placebo effect and
B.) I am such a tight wad about school that I never wanted to miss class, not even for orphans, widows, poor people, or any other numerous "least of these" populations that Jesus specifically highlights in the Word that I love.

I signed up for Piedras Negras for two reasons

A.) it was only a weekend trip and
B.) it was "billed" as a youth trip, and I am such a tight wad about being a "good youth leader" that I thought I should go.

I am not saying that either one of these reasons were good reasons. Thankfully, God works around, in, and through some pretty heinous reasoning.

Linda Marceau has spent fourteen days in Africa twice in the past four years. Not just Afica, but the Compton-like/ arm pit area of Africa. I hold a great deal of respect for this pastor and found it rad that one would get a mighty Choco tan in a third world country and wear Tom's and Ghandi t-shirts to worship on Sundays. In short, I really don't think you could hand pick a better traveling buddy for missions. So with one duffel bag, one beanie, one obnoxious airtraffic-controller-orange trucker hat, 4 gallons of water (just for myself) and one acoustic guitar I jumped into Linda's daughter's toyota with a bag of snacks in hand.

Piedras is only about 20 miles south of the Texas border, but those extra 20 miles teleport you into a place with houses that only have three walls and a sheet in the middle of dust and desert. The dorm we stayed at was adjacent to a cement factory and a junkyard and only the light of the nearby Tecate sign that hung over the corner store told us were to turn. To my surprise, the dorms were very nice.
I just about peed all over myself and somehow managed to bend my body in a 90 degree angle out of laughter (with snorting) when the first thing Linda said was

"we don't have a snack table."

This woman has performed bodily functions on the side of a mountain near a for-real Zulu tribe, held the hands of mal-nourished children with dry snot still crusted on their nostrils, cleaned the house of a one-legged widow, and slept under hot-inferno-temperature mesquito nets.....but our dorm does not have a snack table?

Naturally, Linda sent me to the other room to get a towel.
She then proceeded to place the towel on a bunk so that the banannas and the Nilla waffers had a resting place.

We throw the toilet paper into the trash can because the septic is bad, but our banannas have a toweled bed.

I am not dogging Linda for the need for a snack table...afterall, who can resist a Nilla? I liked the snack table and the comedic relief that it brought with it.

The thing is, we all experienced something like this.
I found myself almost literally (well maybe I was under my breath) cursing because there was no warm water.
It's as if the slightest infringement on my comfort and convience makes me ditch love. It's like when the air conditioning gets turned off and I can't wash my hair then all of the sudden the God I know, who lifted us all out of death and the fiery furnace of our own brokeness, now becomes someone that I can point my finger at and blame for my selfish discomfort.

We all wanted desperately to have that part of us, the part that turns ourselves into our saviors, ripped out of us.

I thought about it as I ripped open the bags of cement mixed with sand to stucco the walls of a classroom. Robert's heart was cut to the quick when he stood in the middle of a six foot by six foot soon-to-be classroom full of kids and imagined the learning that was going to take place there. Robert is an engineer who designs amazing structures for populations ranging from the incredibily camel-through-a-needle type of wealthy all the way down to the homeless. He told us at dinner that night:
"so many of us, me an dthe guys I work with, talk about how great it would be to design the room that they find the cure for pancreatic cancer in. So many of us talk about the great auditoriums we've designed in some of the best higher learning institutions. But, standing there plastering, I thought about all of those little kids who would fill this humble room made of brick and wood and I thought about the value in the Kingdom."

That's what's amazing about working in a place where the wires for the light in the bathroom are exposed and rigged and the toilet hasn't flushed in three weeks. That's what it's like standing in a goat den where the goats look like stick drawings, being fed just enough to feed those who aren't being fed enough.
To Robert, working on the research labratory of Berkley was not as powerful as the six foot by six foot room for children learning their ABCs.

For Andy, Megan, Austin, Tori, Dick, and Hannah the room that housed the three children who could not even lift a finger to feed themselves but who had enough strength to hold someone's hand for thrity minutes was enough to replace a heart that cares too much about a warm shower with a heart that shines like Christ. Andy remembered the girl who just laid there grabbing his hand. Austin remembered the boy on the swing, who never got off the swing, and who never really even tried to connect with the outside world, except when he laughed with Austin. Hannah remembered the boy who only wanted her to follow him around, and Megan remembered the girl who could not stop laughing because the joy could not be contained inside of her alone. For Dick it was rubbing the back of a grown man who probably has not been touched in a warm way in over a decade.

For me and for Linda it was, I suppose keeping in the spirit of the church work that we adore, the worship service at Alleyua church. I only spoke Spanish two times prior to the service.

A.) when I was playing tag with an orphan and I said "Como Se Dice 'you're it?'"
B.) "dos" when I wanted two b-fast tacos

The whole service was conducted in Spanish. There was a man with a green (I said "verde" too, speaking not just broken Spanish but borken Spanglish even) and he would tap our shoulders and point in an English King James Version Bible where the pastor was in scripture.
Linda and I smiled big smiles and laughed when we realized that the scripture pastor Hector was speaking on, was an answer to the issues that we had been praying about for our own church body. We still don't know what pastor hector said about it, but we don know that maybe we got to experience a little bit of Pentecost this morning. The tongue of fire looked like a transliterated Shakespearien sounding chapter in Chronicles in the middle of a pew missing its center support.

We all wanted to leave our addiction to convenience and comfort there.
And I guess in that "daily being conformed," "working out our salvation," "and he who called you will complete the good work he started in you," kind of way...we did. But be assured that this growth did not come without a few moments of humbling. And I guess it was just another picture of mercy that that humbling was usually accompanied by riotus laughter.