Black Friday/Saturday Bolivian Style

If there were a "Black Friday" in Bolivia it would be the semi-annual yard sale at the Santa Cruz Christian Learning Center, Angie's school.  Twice a year, parents and staff of the school fill the gym and the surrounding sidewalks with someone else's future treasure, and it's complete madness.  Last night, after I finished setting up most of our remaining possessions to find new homes, I drove off as dedicated buyers watched from their chairs in line TWELVE HOURS EARLY!  I felt kind of like a Beatle; people were gonna wait overnight to see me, but mostly a little depressed that people were that excited to buy my junk.  When I woke up at 3am to pouring down rain I felt far worse for those people soaking to buy our hand-me-downs.  But this morning as they carried out their armloads of loot just minutes after doors opened at 8am, they didn't seem too upset about dripping all over everything.

Enough about the great sale where we sold everything we took to sell, praise the Lord, even more exciting is that Mosaic's here!  Well, six of their finest at least, have come to visit us and work with our church and the three children's homes they've established a relationship with over the past three years of their visits. After their overnight flight I settled them into the guest house to rest and get cleaned up while I returned to finish unloading all our kitchen goods, that we'll now have to figure out how to live without for the two weeks we have left here.

In the afternoon, a semi-well rested Mosaic team jumped into our church's monthly adolescents' event. The plan was to pick up some kids from the neighborhood of our youth leader and join them up with the youth from our church for a soccer game, but at this point it had been raining hard for 12 hours.  We stalled for a bit with an ice breaker game, a lesson on Daniel and his friends' determination and strength against peer pressure, some songs, a testimony, yummy cake, and teaching the kids how to play table football.  When we could stall no longer, one of La Viña's adults suggested if they really wanted to play soccer that badly, we should just ask God to stop the rain. Her husband helped one of the reluctant neighborhood kids, who'd probably never prayed before in his life, to genuinely ask God to stop the rain.  I can't be sure of what the North American team's opinion of that suggestion or prayer was, I would imagine it was similar to my own skepticism.  But when it worked no one was rolling their eyes, they were too busy taking pictures of the double rainbow God replaced the downpour with. And no one was complaining when we spent more than an hour in the cool weather bonding through basketball and soccer with the neighborhood kids.

God answered that little boy's prayer, maybe his very first.  I bet he'll never forget the time when God stopped the rain for us. Or maybe he will. Maybe at the naive age of about nine, you wholeheartedly believe that when God says things like "Ask and you shall receive" it's really as simple as that, so what's the big deal.  Maybe it's us, the skeptics, the weathered, somewhat wearied, travelers on this complex road of answered and seemingly-unanswered prayers that needed to see a miracle to be reminded that God's listening even to the least of these, so why not ask.