Today was another productive day in El Salvador.  We had breakfast at 7am, had a quick team meeting and were back on the road by 8am.  The trip from the hotel down to Guaymango is quite adventurous.  It’s a 30-minute drive going down the side of a mountain several hundreds of feet with winding turns, potholes, pigs, dogs, stopped cars, people, farm equipment, logs and boulders to dodge all the way down.  In my car, Joan usually sits in the back seat and makes all kinds of noises as I try to navigate the obstacles, it’s actually quite amusing.

We arrived at the church by 8:30am and quickly setup for another Kids Club with some other children from the community.  Since we had done this before, the team did a great job of preparing all of the games and the prize table.  The children began to enter early, so Kenny let them jump around on the bouncy house just to keep them entertained.  We began with Marvin’s usual set of goofy songs, then let the kids loose with the games.  We ended the morning with Kristy teaching the children about the different ways to pray.  We could definitely see her 3rd grade teaching experience coming in to play to help keep the kids from being distracted.

While Kids Club was going on, Rayner went to a carpenter’s shop and designed a new sign for the church building.  He thought he would just show the carpenter what was needed, but quickly realized that he needed to stay (along with David and Armando) to work with the carpenter and finish he sign himself.  The final product looked amazing!

After Kids Club, we decided to walk to a local ice cream place before heading to lunch.  It was so nice to once again taste ice cream, it’s the little things that make a huge difference when you are on a mission trip!

During lunch we decided that we should do prayer walks in the afternoon and visit as many houses as we could before dinner.  It was so exciting to see God showing up during the prayer walks once again!  Our team prayed for a little girl named Michelle that had a sore throat and ear aches, you could see the sickness in her eyes when we began to pray.  We prayed for quite some time and asked her if her throat still hurt.  She said yes, she still had pain.  So, we decided to pray some more.  This week we have seen so many physical healings that we all had a new-found faith to continue to pray.  After praying some more, we asked her how her throat felt and she said it still hurt.  Not being deterred, we continued to pray and asked Melissa, a local youth to pray for her specifically this time.  After more prayer, we asked Michelle how her throat felt and gave her some water to try it out.  She said the pain was a little less, so we asked if she was done or wanted us to keep praying, she said to keep praying.  After praying some more, she said that all of the pain was gone!  God is so good!

The teams continued to pray all afternoon while Rayner and I did some leadership training late in the afternoon.  We had dinner all together (more papusas) and headed back to the church for a final night of worship, prayer and encouragement.  This time Kenton helped lead worship and it was so fun to see him finally on the stage!  Some of our team members shared words of encouragement to the local church body, and we ended with an incredibly deep worship experience with the presence of God all over each one of us. 

Tomorrow we head to a beach on the ocean with the local youth as they want to show us one last beautiful area of El Salvador.  We will then check out of our hotel and drive a couple hours back in to San Salvador where we will stay the night (close to the airport).  Sunday we will have to be at the airport by 5 am and should be back at the church by 6 pm or so.

This trip has overall been a wonderful experience for me personally.  I always love partnering with Rayner and the Costa Rica team to do ministry together, they are all such a blessing to me and our team from the U.S.  Probably what I will remember the most about this trip was how much the Holy Spirit showed up when we prayed for people.  It was wonderful seeing hearts broken, souls saved, and bodies healed… it has been quite an experience.  If you have never been on a mission trip before, you really need to go!  I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.  God always shows up, and this time, He really showed off as well.

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