Enseñame A Amar

I'm home :) Thank you all so much for all your prayers and support. I know I updated this a lot less than I thought I would, so I'll just give you a quick basic update.

The greenhouse is almost finished! I absolutely loved working on that with the Nicaraguans and am amazed at how quickly they built it. The reason it isn't complete is that we received a shipment of 300 bikes for a bike shop, and all hands went on deck as we started pricing them and organizing them. Within the first day, we made over 600 dollars, within the second, over a thousand. By this point, they're all probably installing gold toilet seats in the Posada bathrooms.

Over the course of this last month, I learned a lot about everything. Not just about missions, but about myself, and about God, and love and joy and worship and so much more. It was an incredible, incredible experience and something that I learned is that though when we go to foreign countries and call it a missions trip, the disciples never called their travels anything. All it was was love, it didn't need some official name. I used to think that God was calling me to love people in Nicaragua, but now I know he's calling us to love no matter where we are. So why in the world am I making an effort to love people in Nicaragua and then coming home and acting normal?

Early in the trip, I used Enseñame A Amar (Teach Me to Love) just kind of as a motto and one of the songs I played at Friday night worship. But God legit did teach me. Much more than I thought he would.

It's incredible to be home, but it'll be tough not to just go back into the motions. I want to remember what I learned (there's a lot!) and I want to live it, not just talk about it. Doing my devotion this morning I realized that the Devil really wants us to think that those awesome experiences with God in our lives were connected to that place or that person that are gone now. It would be easy for me to think that I won't feel God the same way because I'm in my ordinary place, but now I know that God's the same and his love's the same no matter where we are.

Thank you all again, for everything. This trip was challenging at some points, but rewarding beyond imagine in the end. And it wouldn't have been possible without all of you :)

God bless,
Mark