A day on Stone Island

Today was an AMAZING and LONG day on Stone Island. Lydia and I headed out there around 9am this morning and began our "rounds" of visits to various people's houses. We passed out some shoes from the "Footprints" program where people sponsor shoes for poor children. We also got to pass out some vaccinations for dogs with a disease that causes hair loss, open sores and eventuallly death. People can hardly afford to provide medical care to their family members, much less a dog, so it was so cool when someone said they wanted to help pay for these vaccinations.

One of the stops we went to we got to pray for a woman who had a headache. She didn't seem to be any better at the moment, but we just prayed and then moved on to more house visits. As we were leaving the house, Lydia and I both got a sense that we should just stop and pray for more protection on the day. We normally do this in the car, but we had forgotten earlier. While we were praying, young Luis Antonio found us and followed us around throughout the day. He comes from a horrible background full of neglect, malnutrition, poverty and highly likely abuse. He and one of his sisters are children of their mother and grandfather... you do the math. One of his sisters has suffered such horrible malnutrition that the tendons and ligaments in her knees didn't grow right and she has to lean her legs on each other at the knees just to stand up... Yeah, it's a rough situation. It makes me want to cry every time I see them. Lydia has already done so much to help them and we just continue trying to keep loving them as much as we can... So, it was very special to have him along today. He wanted to hold my hand the whole time, which I was very happy to let him do. We also got to take him out for some tacos and tortas for lunch, which was so fun.

After making more house visits, it was after 3:00pm and time to begin the children and women's Bible studies out in front of the church. I got to help lead the women and children in some worship and kids songs and then helped with the children's class. Everything went really well. As I was starting to put the chairs away, Lydia came up to me and told me that we were going to be there for much longer. At this time, it was around 5:00pm and we had been there since 9:30, I was tired and hungry, and the thought of doing more just felt a little overwhelming. When I asked her why we were going to stay, she said it was to go out and pray people whose children had come to us asking for prayer. I felt a little bit more motivated after hearing that... after all, how can you resist when people need help?

We set out to do a couple of more house visits and that's when the best stuff started happening! We found out that the woman who we prayed for earlier had her headache go away almost immediately after we prayed.... SO COOL! Praise God! Then we went to another house to pray with Clauida, who was telling us all about her recent spiritual battles. There was a witch who had been putting curses on her home and she had called Lydia to come and pray over the house to protect it, and He has! It was so awesome to see her faith so strong in the midst of some very real spiritual battles. The last house we went to was a woman who had called us there to pray for her back. She doesn't come to church, but she's one of the many who go to the La Vina for prayer whenever they're sick because they've seen God work before! It was very cool to be a part of some of these spiritual battles. I know I'm not really conveying how neat of an experience it was, probably because it's late and I'm sleepy, but it was awesome. They are probably pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but this is my fist real experience with it here in Mexico so far. I'm very encouraged to keep praying and looking for opportunities to pray! God is so good!