Sunday

Today was a practical lesson in treasuring the Lord over getting tasks done on schedule. It is so helpful that God chose to fill the Bible with examples of situations that speak right to where I am at! Today, we had such a blessed time of worship and fellowship...and, for once, I was able to lay the "Martha" in me aside and be in the moment even though "my" schedule was totally turned upside down.

Morning began quite pleasantly. We were planning on attending two church services, on in the morning at Pastor Jimmie's church and the other in the evening at the Tabernaculo Biblico Bautista Amigos de Israel "Mejicanos". Between the two services, we planned to count, label, and bag our pills for Monday's clinic (always an undertaking of mammoth proportions).

We had such a blessed time at our dear friend Jimmie's church. So many people hung around to talk with us after the service! I had such a fun time visiting with a sweet woman named Doris who could not speak any more English and I could Spanish...yet, by the end our visit, we actually knew quite a little bit about each other! It is so special to get to connect with brother's and sister's in Christ in a country that is not our own. We eventually got around to loading ourselves back up on the bus, and away we went to a Mexican Restaurant (not El Salvadorian foot, but Mexican food). San Salvador is like the New York City of El Salvador and it has many different kinds of restaurants to choose from. The food there was wonderful, but our huge group overwhelmed them. We had our mission team of 31 people plus a large number of our friends from Brother Jimmie's church with us. We filled up the small restaurant and there were no tables left. After we arrived, there were four or five other sets of people who came to eat there, who weren't able to stay because there was no room left. I had ordered Chicken Fajitas. Our tables were arranged in three long rows. The food trickled out four or five plates at a time. People on the near end of the first row had already finished their meals before the people on the far end of that same row had even been served. Next came our row. I was not worried, as either person in either side of me got their meals, but when the entire row had eventually been served and they began serving the third row (no one there from our team), I got a bit worried and spoke up. Someone went ahead and bused most of our team back to the hotel. I stayed behind, still awaiting my food(!) and six other people from our team stayed behind with me--all of them had been served already and most of them had finished. A bit later, Jimmie walked by with a burrito that no one claimed. It was just going to be sent back to the kitchen...and, I figured, any port in a storm!...so, I called the burrito in lieu of my still waiting to be cooked chicken fajita! I had considered getting the burrito made out of tongue when first ordering, just for the novelty of it, but, then had decided I did not want to invest my entire meal in something that I might not like. But, as I ate the unclaimed burrito, I, having no way of KNOWING what it was filled with, decided that the beef tasting meat was probably tongue! That made it worth skipping a fajita for!

By the time I wolfed down my "tongue" burrito and we raced back to the hotel, it was already 3:45 and we were to leave for evening service at 4:00! Gone was the time I had planned for us to prepare our medications for clinic! Oh, well...I figured that evening service would last about an hour and we could work on the medications after that. In the meantime, I was delighted to find that Darcy and three or four of the women had been busy bagging and labeling pills while I was still languishing at the restaurant. (Darcy has been a HUGE help already...from all the help she gave before we even left on the trip, unpacking and repacking the medications, to all the help she had genuinely been since we arrived.)

I thought evening service would be about an hour. And, truthfully, it seemed about an hour. So, I was shocked when Darcy pointed out to me that it had lasted THREE hours! Three hours...wow!...not much time left to prepare all Monday's medications!!! The church invited us to stay for supper, so we did. We had refried beans, fried plantains, cheese, sour cream (but not like our sour cream...this cream was good to mix in the beans) and the juice of a fruit I have never heard of that is grown here (begins with an "a", I think...already have forgotten its name!). By the time we got back to the hotel, it was already 8pm! Everyone went straight to work and we worked like crazy until 10:15pm. Then I came back up to our room and spent another hour and a half trying to sort out Thursday medications from Fridays (not labeling and bagging, just getting them separated from each other since customs tore open some of our bags and the medications had gotten mixed together)...and trying to figure out which suitcases had what day's medications in them (as the labels we had put on them in Bolivar had gotten smudged off)!

One thing God has taught me since the last mission trip is to live in the moment and not stress over what needs, yet, to be done. I am so thankful that my heart had the peace to be lost in the service tonight instead of fretting over what remained to be done back at the hotel. As it turned out, everything we needed to get done has gotten done, pretty much(!)...even though the time we had allotted to do it turned out not to be available for us to work in. God provided us with a second nurse this trip who has had past medical mission trip experience and has always been in charge of the pharmacy. What a blessing!!! And Sherry, who ran the pharmacy with me last time, has done SO MUCH ahead of time this time around...both of them had prepared so much before we ever even arrived in El Salvador that we were able to complete our preparations for tomorrow's clinic in the severely limited amount of time we had available today!

It has been a very good day! Tomorrow will be our first clinic. (Well, actually, today, since as I write it is already well past midnight.) We will be at Jimmie's church...our first clinic will be on familiar ground! My heart is eager to be there again! It's so funny...I was so stressed out and worn out before we ever left on this mission trip that my heart just was no longer in it. Honestly, if I hadn't already made the commitment to go, I would have bowed out. Yet, the moment I looked out our bus window as we sped through the dark night to our hotel last night, something in my heart just awakened and I was so very thankful to be back. As looked out the bus window into the night and saw familiar spots along the road, I remembered all over again two years ago when I rode a bus through the night and saw this place dimly in the dark for the first time. Then, everything had been so unfamiliar...now, everything seemed so familiar. A part of me felt like I was home again. And I am so grateful God has allowed me to come back. Last time, I was overwhelmed with the task ahead...always so exhausted and stressed...but, this time, something in me has learned Mary's secret of knowing what is most important and not letting the tasks which are piling up deter her from treasuring the gift God is giving in the present moment. That is the peace that allows you to get so caught up in a three hour worship service that you do not realize you have just worshiped right through the time you had thought you would have to finish all the work left undone! What a joy the service tonight was. What a joy the service this morning was! And what a wonderful time of fellowship we had together the hours that we spent in the Mexican Restaurant waiting on our food! I pray God will help me bring that peace back home to my life there, too...not just here!