Trip of 2014

So we made it down for another year! Micaiah, Baxter, Colton and I teamed up with Starfish Orphan Ministry (based in Paducah, Kentucky) and it has been fantastic! We flew to El Salvador yesterday and arrived late last night after a fairly quick and very safe trip.

This morning we went to church, which is always one of my favorite experiences. It is just beyond amazing to me that even though we are singing in English, and the church is singing in Spanish, we are all worshiping God. We are all praising and bringing glory to the one, true God. How beautiful is that? Sometimes people get so frustrated with language barriers, but I don't. Because when it comes down to it, I think it's pretty stinking cool that God gets to be worshiped in so many different languages and in so many different ways!

After church we went off to one of the orphanages that I have been going to for about 4 years now. There are so many less children than there were my first year, and there have been many improvements. It is so amazing to see God using the missionaries down here! But as we walked around Colton made a comment about what it would be like to live in a place so dirty, and it made me realize that instead of looking at the current situation, I was just comparing the current situation to the past. So as amazed as I am that there are such improvements being made, I never want to forget that God has so many more improvements He wants us to make. Even though situations for these kids are BETTER, we should never stop trying to make things as good as they can possibly be.

Tonight we did one of the hardest things for me: feeding the homeless. It's raining tonight (of course, it's rainy season) so it's a bit chilly for a Salvadorean night in June. We all curled up in our rain coats, ponchos, and piled into the bed of the truck. We were all hit with cold, cold rain as we drove, and we were all pretty ready to get back to the house to get dry. The problem with this is that when you feed the homeless, and it's raining, and you get to go get warm and dry, you realize that the people you're feeding don't get to go get warm or dry. And while feeding the homeless you see children, mothers with babies, handicapped men, kids you used to work with in the orphanages, and people getting high off glue to distract themselves from being cold and hungry. All of those people are stuck out on the cold, wet streets while I am blessed enough to get to crawl into a bed, in an air conditioned room, and go to sleep.

I talked to one of my friends here about it for a while and I understand that people are typically homeless because of choices they make. But does that make it any less sad? Should I not get choked up seeing a young boy sleeping on the sidewalk in the rain just because he chose to run away? No. I should know God has a bigger plan for all of this. His plan is perfect and there is nothing I can do to hurry His plan along, or change it. I may not ever understand why those people are in the situations they are in, but that's not the point. I just pray God continues to use this week to strengthen my trust in Him and always let my heart break for others.