Wednesday, 25 January 2017
This morning, with Students International, we completed Study #9 in our devotionals, which was on Daniel chapter 6. The story was about Daniel being thrown into the lions’ den by King Darius the Medo-Persian. The theme of trusting in God and knowing that He is fighting for us in the hard times had been made very evident throughout the lesson. Apenisa, a speaker that we had a couple days before, gave us a great start to our day with some laughter our. His take away from the devotional was this: Don’t try and dwell on the past to predict your future, but live in the present and let God show you the purpose and reason for your history. Drawn into worship, we praised God with Drew (Austin), Keegan, and Tanner. During the set, Heath joined them in front and read one of his own “spoken words.”
Andrew Warnock: Today in El Callejon we learned how Dominican Coffee was made from tree to cup. First, starting with putting the nut into a grinder with a spiked cylinder to crack the shell and let the bean come out on the bottom. Typically, the next step would be to sun-dry the beans for 3 or 4 days, but to speed up the process, we roasted the beans in a pot over a fire. Then, took the roasted beans and put it into a grinder to make beans into a powder consistency. Our Education group was with the Woman’s Social Work site during the process, and everyone from both groups hung out until it was time to go back for lunch and siesta. After lunch, we went back to the tutoring building and did a lot of cleaning, organizing, playing and teaching English to finish the workday.
Russell Woo: I’m at the sports ministry site. This outreach consists mainly of helping our site leaders, Dave and Moreno, coach their 12 and under baseball team. Today, we had practice at 9AM. We first had to drive and pickup the kids. These truck rides are always the best! With 10 to 12 rowdy kids and 7 goofy Joshua students in the back of a truck, there’s lots of singing, laughing, and building friendships. During practice, we had two groups of kids, some around 9 or 10, and others around 11 or 12. Drew (Austin), Brian, Ben, Tanner, and I, played a couple innings against the younger group. Jacob and Keegan helped the older group with drills like catching grounders and working double plays. To finish out practice, the gringos and I (The Chino) played the kids in a couple innings. We of course won. For lunch, many of us went to a little hole in the wall for some tasty Dominican rice, chicken, beans, and salad. After a hot day of baseball, Dave and Moreno took us to the river where we swam. Surprisingly our day ended early around 2:30. We usually don’t get back till around 6:10 (half way through dinner). And as usual, we ended our day with a fantastic dinner, great fellowship, and a goodnights rest.
At our 7PM team debrief, Bob led us in a time of sharing our experiences in the Dominican Republic. Each person had a maximum of 3 words to share, which could have been three individual words, or a very short sentence to explain what God has been teaching us on this trip. For example mine (Andrew) was: Fearlessness, Intention, Laughter. Bob asked me to expand on fearlessness for everyone. I explained it was from what we had been reading the past two weeks about Daniel’s story, but more personally, conquering discomfort in a place of economic and spiritual poverty, while overcoming a feeling of being judged because of my skin color being associated with economic success and privilege. Further, my choice of the word “intention” was because it was what I have been trying to work on with everyone on this trip. The interns, the students, the site supervisors, and those I was able to love in the classroom and/or playground. Time with people can become very short but will have much more meaning when the conversation has great intention. Laughter was my third and favorite word choice, because it is a universal language of joy. Laughter breaks all language barriers and can create comfort, or can destroy anger. Being able to laugh a lot with the kids I was help teaching and with my site leader, Joel, I was able to feel a great connection with them, despite having a very limited number of words that I was able to communicate with all of them. At the conclusion of the meeting, Bob addressed the students and called them to a higher level of expectations. He said, “You know Hume. You know Joshua. You understand what this program takes, what it is about, what the rules are, how it works, and how much effort you need to put into it. You are responsible for yourselves and are going to be called to a higher level now. If you’re not following these rules by now and will continue to not, you’re lying to yourself. You’re lying to yourself because you really must not want to be in the program because you refuse to put yourself into self-discipline that you signed up for in the beginning of this year. It’s time to own it.” The rest of the staff also encouraged us to not get flustered with going back to Joshua, but to remain in the moment and continue to focus on or impact here in the DR.
DR – Day 9 from Joshua Wilderness Institute on Vimeo.
