Pride Comes Before a Fall

The wedding this past weekend was "scrumdittlydumptious", but I'm not here to write about that yet. First I have to finish my narrative about that trip I went on.

I left off at about the first day... Monday, July 13 was our first whole day in El Salvador. We were given a tour of the orphanage grounds and told the story of its origin. Read about the ministry at the orphanage here. Later that morning we had some time to prepare a Bible story and craft to do with the kids that afternoon. Every weekday the orphanage opens their doors to the neighborhood kids, feeds them lunch, gives them opportunity to do homework and play games, and also have a Bible story time. About 50-70 kids come in every day and it was so fun to be able to interact with them, even with my limited Spanish vocabulary. (Hablar un pequito Espanol.) But I did find out right away that when one tries to do something in their own strength, the Lord usually allows it to fail. For example, we (or rather I) came up with this great craft to go along with our Zaccheaus Bible story. My Mom had sent a whole bunch of craft supplies with me, so we had just about everything we needed for a super craft time. I came up with making two pipe cleaner men, one to be Zaccheaus and one to be Jesus and our Zaccheaus was climbing a tree made out of wooden shapes and popsicle sticks glued together. It went together so well when we practiced making them before hand! I was so glad and pleased and had given myself a good pat on the back for coming up with such a grand idea. (It really was very cute.) But once we got into a classroom with 15 kids who didn't speak English and who had no idea how to make pipe cleaner men, it was a whole different story. The glue wouldn't stick, the boys were impatient, the girls tried diligently, I had to remake 20(ish) of the pipecleaner men individually because my English speaking friends didn't even understand me when I showed them how to make it. One boy decided he would make magic wands with his popsicle sticks instead of trees and then he was freezing his classmates. I was ready to quit. When it was all said and done, my class (there were four total) was the only one who had only half or less of their craft done. I'm not sure how the other classes did so well, but we all agreed it was rough.So, the Lord taught me very quickly that I shouldn't be so quick to think I'm real smart. After all, pride really does come before a fall. Glad He taught me that on the first day and didn't wait too long to get it across to me.

And now you will have to wait for more. Josh is up and cranky as ever. He has had a rough couple of days and we need to spend some quality time together before he grows up without me.