God is working on my heart. After our debriefing meeting at the Travel Lodge in San Antonio, I said my good byes, hopped into the van with a few others for the short ride to the airport, and then found myself all alone for several hours waiting for my flight. I had not come as part of a contingent from a church as a lot of others had done. I had mentioned to Dave Coryell that I was thinking of writing one last blog after the debrief meeting, and he had suggested that I do it at the airport. So what did I do at the airport? Not the blog. I spent time looking at pretty women, reading the local newspaper to catch up on current events, then more people watching.
Like I said, God was working on my heart, but I didn’t know it yet. On the plane, my ears popped going up to cruising altitude, due to the cold that probably one third of us contracted during the trip. That wasn’t so bad. What was bad was when the plane descended back to earth, my ears started hurting, then stayed plugged up for a long time. My wife picked me up at the airport, and I was reintroduced to LA traffic. It took us about an hour to get away from LAX to the freeway because of some road work and traffic leaving the airport. We decided to not fight the freeway traffic, and motored to a Denny’s for dinner. She had to keep telling me not to yell at her across the table (my ears were still plugged).
After an uneventful long drive on the 405 (still bumper to bumper at 8 pm), we made it back home. It was good to catch up with her on the goings on, plus my experiences on the trip. Just as we were pulling off the freeway, my mother called me. She had been worried about me on the trip, what with all the political nonsense going on. I reassured her that we had no problems, and that actually I was seeing more clearly now one of the purposes of our trip was to be ambassadors bringing peace during these troubled times.
Did I mention that God was working on my heart? Taking a nice hot shower, I crawled into my own bed. My wife asked me if I wanted any cough drops. I told her that my throat didn’t bother me. In fact, I had not had a problem with coughing the entire trip. Just a really sore throat that kept me at the hotel on the day that I enjoy the most- the festival for the kids. They had it at Alianza Christiana Church the third week, and if it was anything like last year, there were thousands of kids whooping it up, with POWER guys doing all sorts of games where the kids would win prizes like soccer balls, basket balls, cotton candy, and other fun stuff. It is always my favorite time. But I digress.
At 2 am in the morning, I woke up and had to cough. I got up and got a cough drop and tried laying back in bed. My throat still tickled, and I got back up and took another cough drop, then laid back down again. Suddenly I realized what was going on. God wanted me to get up and do the blog. So at 3 am, I got dressed, and went to my office (another bedroom in the house). The first thing that I decided to do was look up a scripture that I had tried to find all week. It is from II Corinthians, and says “yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead”. A simple verse, but it has a lot of meaning for me. I did not have the sentence of death, but I was trusting too much in myself. That is another story.
What I really want to relate to you is something that Mario shared, and tugged at my heart. The Mexican people are really nervous about what is going to happen with all the political talk going on. He said that we don’t realize the impact that we are having during our trips to Mexico. It is pretty hard to miss the caravans of big white vans with POWER signs on them driving around town, building churches and houses, and spending time with Bible College students and kids at churches and orphanages. That was a huge encouragement to me, as I didn’t feel that I had accomplished much this trip. But thinking back, there was one of the ladies who was serving breakfast to us at the hotel in McAllen who came up to me early one morning, and asked me to pray for her 19 year old niece, who was going to be reunited with her mother after 16 years. Another man at Alianza Church asked me to pray for a friend of his who needed encouragement in his ministry. These requests will be added to my praise and prayer lists. Prayer works miracles, and through POWER Ministries, we are giving hope to people along the Rio Grande River Valley.
Well, my alarm just went off at 5 am. It is time for me to get ready for work.
Doug