A lot has been going on in Croc since I last posted. Our staff had our break week and spent a few days in the mountains near Monterrey. Last week Olathe Bible Church was here and with their group of 38 we built two houses.

 This is the only two house week of the summer and it came at a good time for our construction team. Aaron and Allie were to lead each site and I bounced back and forth helping them with small dilemmas and covering them on days off. This forced them to be at the sites a good deal of time on their own and face decision making responsibilities while still having me to fall back on if they really needed it.

 One of the other challenges besides splitting our crew for two houses is splitting our tools. No day was this a bigger deal than Monday—the day of the foundation pour. We only have one concrete mixer and so one site had to be completely finished before the other site could start their pour (which can take anywhere from 1.5-4hours).

 When we planned the sites, Aaron’s looked like it would go faster so we gave him priority on tools and gave him the mixer to do his pour first. Allie would wait till he was done. But Aaron’s pour ran into several problems (including some betrayal by a line level). Allie and I had her site ready at 4:30ish. And so we did some pettily perfection stuff with the trenches while most of the group sat in the shade. Around five we sent someone to their site and found out that they have started the pour. We figured at earliest they wouldn’t be done till 6:30 and we followed the group’s leader sugestion to let the kids go back to the dorms and get a snack/rest till 6:15.

 Allie and I too got something to eat with Chepay (one of our Mexican workers) around 6:45 head towards Aaron’s house site thinking that it is starting to get late and perhaps Aaron is cleaning all the tools and forgotten to take us the mixer. When we got there the pour is only about two-thirds done because of several problems (they had run out of sand, gas, and had a horrible time with their leveling because of an over-abundance of gravel in their sand-mix).  We helped him finish.

 About 7:30 the last corner is being smoothed. The question we faced was whether to start another pour. Dinner was supposed to be at 7:00 (we had asked at lunch for it to be pushed back from the usual 6:30). The group is supposed to play games with the neighborhood that night. But if we don’t pour on Monday we can’t do anything but pour on Tuesday because we have to let the concrete cure. Yet, the material store is closed, so if we ran out of sand we would be stuck with half a floor done and then trying to pour on tomorrow to finish it (which would make for a super-weak floor and no advantage of worktime because Tuesday would still be spent waiting for the new side to dry). Also, how can we level and smooth in the dark (we debate about whether it gets dark at 8:30 or 9:00; even if it is 9:00 by the time we got the mixer to the other site and if we did a very fast pour its doubtful to be light out at the end). The idea of using headlamps and flashlights is suggested.

 We talked through all that in about five minutes and I can sense that those are the variables and now it is on my shoulders to make a decision. There is no way to know for sure what is right. I know the group wants to get the house done and that that can’t happen without pouring tonight…but even just having to use the word tonight is nuts! And if we start, what do we do if we run out of sand? It happens to us about a quarter of the time and we always just go to the material store, but we won’t be able to this time.

 So I said, “Let’s pray.”

 And those four or five people around me gathered together and we told God we don’t and can’t know for sure what is right with the information we have. We need His help to make a decision.

 I felt a release, like the responsibility was off my shoulders and in His hands. Within another minute we decided to pour.

 And so we started the pour at Allie’s site around 8:00pm. Ray, their leader, sees our sand pile and bet me we won’t have enough for the pour. About two-thirds of the way through it got dark and had to assign some people to flashlights to guide the work of smoothing and leveling.

 At 9:30 we are put the finishing touches on the foundation; it had gone incredibly quickly—about as fast as they ever go. Also we had enough concrete left over to put a connection between the extended family’s house and the new floor (only about a three feet span).

 At 10:00 we are back at the church and everything is clean and put away.

 

1^st Peter 5:6-7

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.

This week is a smaller group and we have teamed up with the Rehab Center to do a huge VBS in the field near the church. We have giant tents and a lot of cool events going on. On the construction side we are doing some side projects maintaining the area around our site and helping out a baptist church put a finish coat of concrete on one of their walls. Be in prayer for us as we try to find a couple of other small projects to do that can be useful to the comunity.

I know I have slacked on pictures lately, so I want to catch you up. If you lay your cusor on a picture a title for it will come up and you can click on the picture to see a larger verson.

There are several with the first two families we have built for. Also there are some from one of this week’s special projects: Building a patio for a free lunch program Donna Marta runs down in Parsalies.

This week we are hosting our second group and things are going well. We’ve had a little bit of rain today but it hasn’t really slowed anything down on the house construction.

Over breakfast I lead a little discussion with our staff over the morning’s Bible passage.  A couple of mornings ago our daily scripture was Deuteronomy 6. During our talk I brought up the first sentance (which Christ later declares to be the greatest commandment):

Deuteronomy 6:5-9
“Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

I asked our staff what it meant to love God with all of your heart, soul, and strength? What could that possibly mean; how could you love others (which Christ says is the second greatest commandment, Matthew 22:34-40) if you loved God with all you had? We came up with a notion that if you loved God with all of yourself then your love for other people/things would have to flow out of your love for God. But now I wonder what does that really mean, in practive?

At the time however I asked, as we are trying to wrap our brain around what it means to love with everything, if there had ever been a time when you had a purity of focus/concern/love for only one thing/person? Aaron shared about how one season while he was going to K-State he followed basketball super-close. He went to all the home games and was super excited that they were predicted to make the NCAA Tournament. But then as he watched the selection on TV K-State wasn’t chosen. He was so mad and had so much adrenaline flowing he went out and ran 9 miles (he was not exercising at all around this time and ached horribly for a week after the run). That made me ask if any of us had ever even had any adrenaline in any aspect of our relationship with God? No one responded.

As soon as I had asked the question about singular focus on an object I had a story in mind, but after Aaron shared I realized we didn’t have time to go into it and also I didn’t have how the story fit the commandment completely figured out. I knew the story shed light on what full devotion felt like, but I couldn’t quite get it into words at the time. So for the past couple of days I have been following the second part of the quote from Deuteronomy 6 about putting the commands of God on our hearts and thinking about them as we go about our tasks.

My story goes as follows. The last day of school my junior year of high school, I went out to lunch with three of my best friends. As we were leaving we decided to head back to my house, but I (knowing that it would be locked and I would have to let them in) said, “ok let’s go, but let me get there first.”
Smiles came across Rob and Joe’s faces and I realized we were going to have to race now. They were faster geting into their cars than Corey (who was riding with me) and I were. There were about three routes to get to my house, one of which (though maybe not faster) was only known to me and since I had to get ahead and it was hard to pass on 25mph roads I chose to take it fast and try to make up the time I needed.
Also, a side note, I was driving a rusty ‘86 chevy celebrity that was too slow in acceleration to go on the interstate and Rob and Joey were driving a tarus and focus. so this was not quite fast ‘n furious.
As I come up to the four way stop on 19th and Mic-O-Say Joe is already there and gives me this ‘Ha, I’ve won!’ look as he turns ahead of me. There is only three blocks (the last of which is a super steep hill that has a 90 degree turn onto my street) left so Joey’s confidence is justified.
But it ticks me off and I go into a mental gear that was (after the race) dubbed ‘Jake’s competitive mode’. I don’t know if I can quite explain it, but I just only had one goal, nothing else; I only cared about passing Joe and beating him to the house. Getting into a wreak or even killing Corey and I were only bad in that they would by default mean we lost out on The objective.
So I floor it, but as much as I loved the old celebrity when we came to the hill I was still only a 1/4 car length ahead of Joe and in the wrong lane (the turn coming up was to the right). I remember sitting up straight as I came to the hill to try to make sure that now one was coming up in my lane–again not for saftey, but to make sure nothing was in my way. I continue to floor it as we hit the hill and now that gravity is on my side I start to pass Joe. I see he is laughing and signaling that I can’t come over–he has me boxed out. The hill is ending fast, I don’t think I had even fully passed him yet, but I jump over to his lane and have to slam on my brakes to make the corner. Joey fortunately slams on his brakes too so we don’t hit and I am able to maintain enough control to not hit a wooden telephone pole as I round the corner while laying down a thick mark of rubber. I get to the driveway to see that Rob has already made it (we had all taken a different route) and Corey, after a stunned pause, is ticked that I drove that crazily. (And once Joey gets out of his car he is ticked too that we almost wrecked).

But I come out of ‘competitive mode’ slowly and the whole conversation doesn’t affect me much. It was a strange experience. Normally we have so many competing objectives in life (how do I do this, this and this well while staying safe, and also well liked by these people and these other people and while keeping my options open for the future and living up to who I expect myself to be…) That to spend 45 seconds with all of my heart rushing forward for just one thing…it was powerful. It was freeing. It was exhilarating. And when it was done I was, to my surprise, not upset that Rob had won; I wasn’t even that proud that I had beat Joe. What I did feel was this great warmth at having risked at things I didn’t know if I could do (when I jumped in front of Joe I really wasn’t sure we wouldn’t crash and I didn’t know if I could make the turn) and at having literally done all I could do–and knowing that for sure.

As I have thought back to this story about the car race, I have been trying to wrap my head around what can that show me about this idea in Deuteronomy 6. Obviously the race was a dumb goal and it was a stupid thing to risk Corey, Joe, and I’s health on. But what if God was the objective? What if my heart looked at everything with a single devotion to God. If I sat up in my chair, like i did at the crest of the hill on Mic-o-Say, looking only for obstacles to my goal of relationship with God, not caring if there was a risk of materials of safety. Would my whole life become powerful, freeing, exhilarating? Would I look back at the end satisfied that I had laid it all out?

I realize my whole life can’t be an adrenaline blur, and I’m not how exactly how to transfer to God that pure-will of the afternoon in May at 17. But it is a clue. And how exciting a thing it is to put the commands of God on our hearts, to think about them as we go through our days and to see that the truths we find in our experiences help us grasp the truths we read in the Bible. I am finding that Truth runs through goofy races as well as through Deuteronomy and we have a Great God who wants to teach us through both.

Will we take hold of Him?

Here is this week’s audio post:

We are about half way through our first group and things are going well. The six summer staffers are working out great. The two construction supervisors (Aaron and Alee) and I are getting along wonderfully and they are learning how to do things super-fast! This has already freed me up a little bit during the days (I was able to go eat fish with Leo and his mechanic buddies again yesterday for a long lunch and trust Aaron and Alee to cover the site).

And it is definitely God’s provision that I have more help than ever before on construction, because now that I know a lot of people in town I am being called upon for other tasks. Sometimes I would rather be placing wall panels (like when I had a neighbor of the family we are building for come by and ask for a house. I went down to her house with Peluchi and upon seeing the block construction of her house had to explain to her that we are trying to provide one good room to every family in town and therefor can’t build for her), but other times they can be really good interruptions.
For instance, last night I was about to head with the group down to the plaza (a fast-soccer court and playground) when Fernando grabbed ahold of me and went into a quick story about his Dad (Rrego, he and his family received our first house last summer) needing a level for a project. I couldn’t quite understand the project and so asked Fernando if his dad was home and if I could go and talk to him about it. Fernando said yes and so we walked together to his house. Along the way Fernando asked me (for the second time in about as many weeks) when I was going to make more of ‘my bread’ (referring to the banana bread) and come by to visit the family (I haven’t been over to his house for a couple of months, maybe more).
When I got there Rrego showed me the back of the house where he was digging a septic hole. He needs a level for some of the concrete work he will do on it. I told him I could let him borrow one of ours and that if Fernando would walk back to the church with me I could give it to him right away. We started to leave and Rrego made some comment to the extent of “going so soon?”, and I realized how impoliet I was being to not sit down.

So I sat and watch a couple of Spanish soap-operas with them and chatted about their new puppy, Rrego’s job, this week’s building project, and how language school went for me (Rrego and I hadn’t talked much since I left for school and he was impressed that my spanish was so much better). At one point Rrego asked me to talk to Fernando about treating his mom better (apparently Fernando, like a typical 13 year old has started to be a little rebellious. Though I had also heard rumor a while back that he had started ‘cutting’, a terrible practice among some teens down here too apparently. But I didn’t bring this up since it was only rumor). I talked to him about how it is God’s way that we should honor and respect our parents. That this is a hard thing to do as someone gets to be his age, but that this is what God wants for children and their parents. And that while most of us aren’t perfect towards our parents, God sees our hearts and is please when we try to obey and respect them. Also I told him it seems to me that it is hard to be a parent and that they love him very much. To this Rrego nodded his head, which I felt was very significant (it is difficult for males here to show affection to their kids).
Later Rrego asked me if I liked grilled beef with guacamole (which of course I said yes to). He invited me to come over this Sunday night for a carne asada with his family and I asked Fernando if he would like me to bring cookies or bread. He wanted banana bread so I will be making some of to take over this weekend.

Lastly, please be in prayer for me as I go with Rodolfo and Carlos to visit a little town next to Saltillo (about and hour and a half from Croc). YouthFront is in the very early stages of considering opening up a sister site to Croc and we are going to visit a missionary connection Carlos has there to see if this could be a possible site for us. Pray that God guides us and also pray for Aaron and Alee as they lead the construction site by themselves today (Aaron was a construction supervisor in 2005 and also this day of construction (mudding the walls) is one of our least complicated, but still I’m sure they would appricate your prayers). Thanks.

Enjoy this week’s audio post. Below are two photos from my friend Jay’s wedding: 

I’m getting this post to you a little late because last week had a lot going on. As you know I was having some troubles with immigration and my plans to come back to the states and I was also trying to finish my construction training DVD. Things with immigration all worked out and I was able to catch my flight last Friday and make it to the first of three weddings I’m back for. As for the DVD, I thought I had it finished last Wednesday, but have been trouble-shooting with my DVD menu program ever since (pray that I can get that all sorted out soon).

Also though I was tying up a lot of loose ends in town before I left. One of those was visiting with Angela, a lady we poured a concrete roof for with one of our Iowan groups. She lives up the street from me and we see each other often. And she is content to keep a conversation going all by herself so I’ve had some of my longest Spanish conversations with her. For instance I went over to her house early last week to check out a complaint she had with how her roof and wall came together in one little section. We talked this over for about fifteen minutes and then we chatted for another fifteen minutes and I was just about to leave to go back to some video editing when she offered me some coke. It was still morning and I didn’t really want any coke, and in fact I really wanted to just get back to my other work now that I had checked off examining this roof from my list. But quickly the thought flashed into my head that perhaps talking to this grandma who lives by herself was to Christ (unlike to me) far more important than getting the video work done on my schedule.  So I agreed. About an hour and a half later I left.

During our conversation it came out that her birthday was coming up in a couple of days and she invited all of our staff to come. Everyone agreed to come (except Rodolfo who had business in Monterrey that day). I also made some chocolate chip cookies. Some of her children and grandkids had come and they had grilled out and made a great cake.  We all had a good time.

My last full day in Croc, John and I took Angela up to a nearby town to buy bus tickets for her to visit her family (all of her siblings live in another state). She had told the group who poured her roof about how she had become a Christian since moving to the Monterrey area and had never had the chance to share her experience with her siblings. The group had generously provided money for her tickets and travel expenses and I had agreed to buy her the tickets and then give her the remainder of the money. She was thrilled to get the tickets and is excited to visit her family later this month.

That evening she stopped by while the staff and I were about to go out to dinner. She gave me some sweet gorditas (small, thick tortillas that have cinnamon and sugar) and a present for my mom (two cloth covers that had hand stitched bird scenes on them). Amber commented, after Angela had left, she really loves you.

I was reminded of the grace of giving that Paul talks 2nd Corinthians 9:12-15. (The whole chapter has a lot to say about giving, as you may have heard me unpack if you have gone to my Christians in Affluence talk in Croc).

“This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, men will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. And in their prayers for you their hearts will go out to you, because of the surpassing grace God has given you. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!”

Here in Croc I get to be at the forefront of a lot of giving and people focus a lot of their gratitude on me for what the groups have actually done (I was only involved in the bucket brigade of concrete for the roof pour and didn’t pay for her tickets). But also I think Angela’s gratitude and love comes in response to a lot of small things like the warm hellos as we pass on the street, the cookies for her birthday, and maybe more than anything that decision to sit and take an offered coke. To be aware of and respond to the needs Christ puts in front of me, even if they get in the way of my schedule. I’m trying to put into practice that my goal each day should be to please Christ and so my work priority is free to flex to His priorities. I can rest assured that the video can wait because time with Angela is something Christ wants me to do. Still, I had to stay up late many nights trying to get the video done. And I also realize that in a place like Croc there is a necessity to say no at times. I can’t meet everyone’s needs.

And yet, each day, I want to be open to saying yes to the things Christ puts before me. And that will require hard no’s and wait’s to myself and others. But it can result into generous living in which I am so blessed as to have peoples’ hearts go out to me.

 

PS. Please be in prayer for me this Wednesday as I meet with my boss to talk over some of our summer plans and especially as we talk about the future of the ministry in Croc. It is likely that the home construction ministry will change drastically after this summer and we are in need of God’s guindance on where the whole ministry in Croc should go. Also my commitment is up in May 2010 and I am wondering about what the ministry will look like if I stay on after that time.

I decided to go back to writing again this week, but the audio post was well recieved and I will try to start doing many more of them. In fact I got a couple of emails from people sharing how the audio blog really touched them where they were at and encouraged them in there walk with Christ!

This week Peluchi heard that it was the birthday of one of Goyita’s grandchildren (Goyita and five related families live togther in Valles–a town next to us–because about a month ago their houses got torn down by the actual land owner). So we decided to make cookies and go out to see them. While I was mixing the sugars, vanilla, and butter together Peluchi asked ‘why do you do that’
I started to explain the recipe called for mixing these things together first before you add anything else and that it makes a difference in how they turn out. But he said, ‘no no, not that, why do you bake things for people.’
(a little back story, one of my biggest activities here is to visit the families we have built for in the past, each time I do this I take a long a baked good of some kind, ussally banna bread or cookies)
I explained that baking is a great gift. Other gifts are often linked to money and tend to awaken greed in people, like for instance when we replaced the electrial and roof insulation at Eddiberto and Clara’s after a fire, they immediately started asking for paint and materials for a patio. (I couldn’t elude to this book with Peluchi, but it is very similar to ‘if you give a mouse a cookie’). Not that these gifts are wrong, Eddiberto and Clara needed the work we did and it was good to have done it, but it was messy and doesn’t help the relationship much because it ends on a ‘no’. But baking is different, people rarely pressure for more baked goods as they are eating (except Jovani, who even while devoring freshly made cookies wants to know when we will bake together again).
Instead it is this great gift that simply makes people happy. Furthermore I explained to peluchi that these house visits can sometimes be a little akward and I can’t show with my words that I truly care about them. But by baking something, they understand that I care.
The reason for baking sunk in with this last part for Peluchi. He knows better than anyone how my spanish can be laking at times and also how the fact that I made cookies from scratch communicated to the people better than I can with words.
So Peluchi and I went to the houses in Valles and meet a crowd of about twenty people. We got to talk about all sorts of things. Some of the men pulled me aside and showed me a rattle snake that they had killed in their yard and we talked about how the young snakes are actually more dangerous than old big ones like this one (which was about 4 feet long) because the young ones use all their venom at once (it was good for my comprehension that I had already had similar conversations like this in english). Peluchi made jokes I was even able to follow and join in with to get the families laughing (My spanish is getting better). They loved the cookies and had heard rumor of my banana bread and wanted to try it some other time.
It was a fun night.

A few of prayer requests before I go: I haven’t seen Roberto since two sundays ago and am hoping he continues to make an effort to go to church. I’m continuing to edit the construction training DVD and need to finish it by the end of next week. School has been canceled here because of this swine flu thing, no one has gotten it in Croc, but please pray no one does. And lastly, the staff has been in the process of getting volunteer visas (right now we have only tourist visas and shouldn’t be doing any work). While investigating us for this visas, the mexican immigration office found that we were working here already and has fined us (yep, I’m ironically an illegal in Mexico). We are going to pay the fine tomorrow and then I am going to get a permission form to leave the country in May while they are still processing my visa. Please be in prayer all of this goes smoothly and I will be able to make my flight on May 8th.

Lastly, all of this talk about a conversation with Peluchi may leave you wondering where is the video that was promised (see poll at top right). I have told peluchi he was choosen out of the four choices and he was flattered. We will try to get it filmed this week.

This week I decided to try doing an audio post.

 

let me know what you think of it:

Schools in Mexico get two weeks off for Easter and our after school program has done the same. About half the staff has gone back to the States and Rodolfo, Amber, and I have taken a break from our morning meeting and some of our other responsibilities. I’ve still done some electrical work for a family, some house visits, and collected money for one of this summer’s houses (families are now paying about a tenth of the cost of materials for the homes we build). That last part was a real blessing: we launched a savings program with little savings boxes, but until this week no one had actually saved anything (the two families we built for this spring choose to take out high interest (60%!) loans instead. But this week Angelica and Juan-Jesus saved 400 of their 3000 pesos! 

Also this week my housemates and I have been working on several projects around the house. It has been a lot of fun to work on my own house. Katie and I built a couple of fences to wall off two sides of our house for Benito (our puppy). This way he has a lot larger space to run around in. The front wall even has a door to make it easy for us to get in and out. And our little Steve McQueen, after a first day adjustment, hasn’t been able to break out yet.

 

We also extended our patio and added some gravel around the fire pit. So now it is a lot easier to circle up chairs on the patio when we have people over. We can even easily fit a table to eat around out there now when we do hamburgers or carne asada.

 

Lastly we’ve been working on making and putting in shelves to give us some more space.  

 

It’s been fun to plan out new projects and be able to work on them at an easy pace. But it has also been a little strange; it has reminded me of doing projects around my home in Blue Springs with my Dad. Except this time I was in the dad role, my housemates were looking to me for instruction and I was planning the projects out. One morning Jovani (my seven year old neighbor) stopped by and wanted to help with the fire pit gravel that I was working on. I was shoveling it in a wheel barrel and pouring out. Both jobs Jovani is not big enough to do. But I remember being in Jovani’s position and it was important to give him something that actually needed to be done. So I got him spreading it around level. It was something I was doing quickly with my foot and it took him a lot longer to do it with a combination of hands (while on his knees) and a rake, but he did a good job.  

Easter was also a good time here. We had a sunrise service at church and everyone dressed in white (I wasn’t aware of the tradition, but fortunately wore a white/blue stripped shirt, so I wasn’t far off). Then we had breakfast together.

 

Also this week, I’ve been trying to slow down and spend some time in silence and solitude with God each day in the evenings. At the end of these little building projects it has been wonderful to stop and be still for about a half hour as the sun is going down. I’m trying to get ahold of what David is talking about here:

 

Psalm 131

A song of ascents. Of David.

 ¹ My heart is not proud, O LORD,
       my eyes are not haughty;
       I do not concern myself with great matters
       or things too wonderful for me. 

² But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
       like a weaned child with its mother,
       like a weaned child is my soul within me.

 ³ O Israel, put your hope in the LORD
       both now and forevermore.