Tuesday, February 11th 2014
Dear Reader,
As I'm writing this to you, my team and I are laying in our beds, trying to fall asleep after a fun and eventful day before our departure tomorrow.
Yeah. That means we've finished our time of ministry in the villages of West Kalimantan.
Pretty cool, hmm?
On our way back from our last village, it officially hit me; wow. What a privilege it was to live and breathe here for a couple months. I've seen so much. So much healing and so much freedom and so many stunningly beautiful faces and places. And I've heard and smelled and tasted so many good things and so many terrible things. And I've felt so much. In my heart and on my skin! I have about a zillion ant bites all over my arms and legs right now... And it would sound kinda cliche to say that "it was completely worth it"... But it is. And I can't think of fancier words to use to describe it. Even them mosquitos don't freak me out any more. Sometimes these hard things escort us into the greatest adventures of out lives. They frame the biggest opportunities we've ever seen in the small numbers of years we've been alive. Opportunities to love deeply, hope for victory, and to dance in the healing rains.
And it's worth not having a toilet. Or a bed. Or even drinkable water at some points.
It's worth the hard conversations with your mates, the grace we decide and the compromises we make for each other. Those are chances to learn and grow and get stronger. And that's whether your in the Field or not.
A few more things I wanted to share with you guys about these past few weeks:
We just got back from a little city named Pinyuh. The city is surrounded by forest and fields. Apparently, someone had just bought out part of the field and set fire to everything that was dead and brown, with intentions to replant with palm-oil trees. HOWEVER, because it hadn't rained over that land in over a month, and because of the scorching temperatures, the fires spread and took out a whole lot more than they were suppose to.
Driving through that land, I had noticed so many homes sitting among those forests and I wondered how they hadn't been burnt to the ground.
For the rest of the week, the land burned and a thick cloud of smoke spread throughout the surrounding towns and villages, contaminating the air and dimming the sun to the point where I could stare at it through the smoke, wondering what was happening.
Haze for days, I'm tellin' ya.
Then Pa Leó told me that the soil was burning with the roots as deep as 9 feet below the ground, creating all the smoke.
Because of this unforgiving accident, so many of our prayer times with the local families were spent praying for healing and quick recovery for the men and women and children who's throats and lungs were sick and parched from the smoke. We also prayed for rain over every home, for spiritual and physical detox of the atmosphere. It blew me away, a plague of smoke over 3 or 4 entire districts, but we continued to pray.
Finally, in our last full day of ministry, the sky opened up and healing rains came to clean the air and bring health back to the people.
Here in Borneo, when it rains, the people will quit everything they're doing to find shelter for their heads and to watch the rain fall. They have a common superstition that if you get rain on your head, you'll get very sick. But this rain was cleaning the air and working with the God of the Universe to quench these bodies and these grounds and to put an end to the fires and smoke.
Today, the air is still getting cleaned up. I see lots of those face/mouth covers. Some are actually pretty cutely decorated.
Anyways, tomorrow we head home.
From here we fly to Jakarta, from Jakarta to Japan, from Japan to Denver.
That is all for now.
I have butterflies in my stomach.
You decide how literally to take that.
-GFly
"Grace, what are you looking forward to when you get back to the States?"
"Artichoke heart pizza."
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