There was a lot that we did today at the worksites here in TJ. Our group is doing well and we were excited to hear from God's word this morning from Eddie Passmore. He taught out of Luke 24 about how Jesus wants us to be fully surrendered to His plans and faithful to carry them out. For lunch at our worksite, our team had tacos that would be worthy of opening up an entire restaurant for in Simi. These tacos would put Campos out of business! Each person on our team was given a plate of 4 hard shell jalapeno and beef tacos that might come back to haunt us later but were well worth it at the time =). Keep praying that God meets with us and directs our plans for our lives. Thanks!

Mark

We've (almost) come to the end of our journey after an exciting week of dodging bullets and crazy car chases we still have 11 of our original 13 team members.

This morning we heard from Eddie Passmore, the director of Mexico Caravan Ministries. He challenged us with "The 10 Commandments of Going," five things to walk away from and five things to walk toward. We have been encouraged to discern God's leading in our lives and to always be willing to go and working to send. As John Piper has said, "Go, send or disobey."

Thursday brought about some interesting changes for our team. We built another house: par for the course, right? Wrong. We ended up building a larger house in a more constricted area than previous "builds" this week. We managed to forget to pack saws (but, fortunately, there were enough between the staff toolboxes and Myron's tools). We also had some extra staff on hand, including both the current and founding directors, Eddie and Dave. The house we built today was an extra 48 square feet, 192 as opposed to 144 square feet (16x12 this time). The family also made us a familiar lunch today: mole, rice, and tortillas. The difference today is that the mole had more spice in it and was made with pork instead of chicken. The final similarity to previous days is that this family's previous house had also been destroyed by a fire.

On the subject of the family, their younger children were excited to help us out in the tasks required to build the house today, mostly being involved in getting the exterior painted. The family was so thankful for such a small house, furthering our group's general realization that these people, who have so little, are so grateful for the small shelters that we construct for them. It brings to mind a point that we heard earlier in the week: People are the only thing that matter. These people we came to serve care enough about us to put together high-quality meals that likely put them in financial hardship. They also seemed saddened when they didn't have any extra rice to give us seconds. All in all, the build went very well: nobody was injured, and the family enjoyed their "house-warming  tub".