tuesday morning in mexico

Here am sitting in a camping chair at 6 in the morning wondering how I am going to even come close to doing justice with words when trying to describe how sweet this trip has been so far. The only phrase I can think of right now is blown expectations.
You see we as leaders always have expectations on these type of trips. We desire the kids to
behave and be respectful. We want to build good relationships with our team mates as well as
our Mexican brothers and sisters. We want to see the kids dive into God and experience His life
changing presence in there lives. We had these expectations as leaders, but we knew we had to give them to God and say, "Lord have your way, Lord we give this trip to you, take it for your Glory." We prayed this and we trusted God would show, You guys have been praying and trusting that God would do this as well. Well let me tell you, it is Tuesday morning, we are not even half way through the week, and God has done what he does so well. He has blown our expectations out of the water.

He has done this on almost every level that we could have asked for. The kids are relatively happy, they have had awesome attitudes and have been willing to serve no matter what. Tons of kids have done acts of service for the team such as cleaning out our toothbrush spitting bucket
without being asked, and carrying down a massive hill our coolers full of food. Yet this is
just the start. We have had an amazing start to our relationship with the local church here.
They have blessed us so much, we are having so much fun with them, and we have tried to do what ever it was that was they needed us to do. It is like we are a long lost group of friends from
North America and they are welcoming us home. It has been so awesome so far.

The last thing I want to share is how God met us spiritually in our team. Last night we had
a bit of a different chapel were the speaker talked about the idea of pretend Christians.
He said that when we are kids we are oblivious to pretending, we are who we are and we act how we act. But some where along the line we get hurt, or scared, and we want people to like us
and accept us. So what do we do, we start pretending to be who we really are not. With this
statement of truth came the speakers main point. Pretend people have pretend relationships. If
we are not real with God and with each other we can never have a real relationship with either one. He then called us to make the next step in our faith walk. To get real with God, and let me tell you, It was amazing. So many of the kids came down to the front with tears in there eyes just hungering to be real and experience more of God. We broke off into small groups after this and shared with each other, lifting our hearts to God in prayer. It was a break through moment for so many of the kids and I was so privileged to be there to witness it. After we shared and prayed together we went back up to the chapel for a time of worship. We stood there just praising God together staring into the stars and it was here that God showed us again he was with us. We were looking into the stars and suddenly blam blam two shooting starts shot across the sky and it was like God was shining down on us. That was a cool thing for me because I have never seen that before. I heard one member of the group say that they were praying "Lord I wish I could just see your face" and just after she said that the stars shot across the sky. She said it was like God was telling her that He is shining all around us and that He is calling us to follow him with everything. It was amazing, the whole week has been amazing so far and we still have half of it to go. We are excited to see what else God wants to do.

So once again thank you all for reading this blog update. Keep us in your prayers because your
prayer is our victory. God is doing so much but we need protection because the enemy will
try his best to knock us down, so please keep praying. Thank you guys for all your support
and love.
Blessings
Fred