Starting Language School-Antigua Guatemala

In a word: I am in Antigua, Guatemala! Safe and sound! I am studying Spanish with a tutor 1 on 1 everyday along with all of my other 12 missionary friends on their way to South America! God has opened the door for me to share the gospel with my new friend Carlos who lives in the same house as me. He is a Universalist but he is open to hearing more Jesus! Please pray he would be saved! I just finished climbing a volcano in the middle of the night! Check at the pics at www.tellperu.org They are in the news shed! Continue to pray for adjustment because it is not easy to speak Spanish and be corrected every sentence you speak! Pray for unity amongst all of the missionaries here with me and that God would open the door for us to share!
Practical stuff: So I live in a house with a grandma named Juana, her son named Roberto and her grandson Carlos. It is a bit confusing why they all live there but lets just say that Carlos needs to be closer to school and Roberto is trying to figure out if he is going to marry his girlfriend he has had two kids with. This family is very close knit and has all of the family over very often! Therefore I get to practice my Spanish all of the time with them. Carlos speaks some English but not enough that he and I can communicate real well with it! That is good because I need to practice as much as I can! I go to a school named Appe that apparently is fairly new to the city from what I have heard but it is a great school. I sit and learn 1 on 1 with a tutor who doesn’t speak any English for about 4 hours a day! It forces me to learn and it is very good for me! I eat some vegetables here that I have never seen before and sometimes I have to gag as I eat it. Eating the food placed in front of me is important to these people! So I try as hard as I can even if I don’t like it! For the most part though the food is amazing that Juana cooks for me. I am here with 4 people from the REAP North Team (my team in Peru) Jessica Brooks, Mindy McCord, Christine Jackson, and Jim Gilstrap! Not to mention the other 8 missionaries that are here learning Spanish as well! We have a lot of fun together and it is a joy to have people to learn Spanish with!

City stuff: Antigua is so diverse because there are so many Spanish schools! I had a Norwegian lady living in the same house as me and now I have a British guy living in the same house as me! It is fun because I get to share the gospel with people literally from all over the world! It is a little overwhelming at times but English or Spanish tend to be the default languages for everyone to talk to each other! The city has I think nearly 30,000 people and I think 1,000 of those people are students that are in and out all year. Antigua is a tourist town so it is filled with white people every weekend. Sometimes I don’t feel like I am in Guatemala, but I am quickly reminded of where I am when a huge chicken bus blows fresh pollution all in my face walking to school every morning! This is a great place to visit but just remember to travel in herds and guard your bag because it is likely to be stolen especially on the weekends!
Sharing the gospel: God has opened the door for me to share with my friends here in Guatemala many times. First with my new friend Carlos who lives with his grandmother in the home I am staying in. He is a 20 year old Latino with Universalist viewpoints! I got to share the gospel with him in Spanish and got to talk to him about nailing down what truth is in the world. I also have had the opportunity to share my faith over and over again with my tutor Miguel. He is a strong Catholic man and we have talked about faith in Christ nearly every day for the past two and half weeks. We literally open the Bible and talk about it for 2 hours everyday. As I have asked him questions and studied about Catholicism I have found that Catholicism has some major, major differences from Protestants. Grace is the main thing—Mary apparently is the giver of the grace that Jesus purchased for us on the cross! YIKES! So that would be why Mary worship has started all across the world. Not to mention the Mayan traditions that are mixed into the Catholic Church. If you want to know more of that e-mail me! God has also opened the door for me to share with 6 different foreigners here at the school. Their names are Marium, Lela, Lockey, Benedicta, Alex and another guy that was standing with a group I was sharing with. All of these students are very post-modern and most of them have never even thought about an after life. I think this is mainly because most of them don’t care at this point in their life but please pray that it would become the first thing they think about every morning!

Church: God has blessed us with the opportunity to get connected at a bilingual church named El Camino during the week and as of today a Guatemalan led church on Sunday. The name of the church I visited today is Life and Faith. It was a 3 hour long service that had me on the edge of chair the whole time waiting to hear from God. I was really fed today in church and challenged to go and share the gospel with the Guatemalans that I have grown to love! Please pray for Life and Faith Church, El Camino, and another church I have visited named The Church of Central Americans. These churches are trying to reach Guatemalans in Antigua and in all of the villages that surround the area. Please pray for them as they reach out and reach their own people for Jesus!

Personal Remarks: Ok I will be honest my head hurts me a ton sometimes after school! My goodness it is ridiculous at times! Sometimes I just tell my teacher I have to go to the bathroom because I want to just yell in English for a while hahaha! At first it seemed I was picking up on everything really fast but the more I study the more I realize I don’t know! My goodness there are so many different ways to say one verb hahaha! Please pray for language learning! Please pray for all of us missionary’s here in Antigua that God will open the door for us to share! We are here to learn Spanish but we are Christ’s ambassadors wherever we are! God broke me today at the Life and Faith church. I just had to cry out for a while asking Him that he would save my friends! Please begin to weep in asking for Carlos, Miguel, Roberto, and Juana. Please pray that they would be saved! Finally, pray for a bit of culture shock—I got really angry when I started reading about all of the Catholic stuff. It makes me angry that it is that far off. I mean it seems that Jesus is not enough for the Catholics and it seems that every Catholic thinks something different than even what the Vatican says! So this makes it difficult to get past what people say they believe and what they actually believe! Please pray God will calm my anger about that and would change it to love for the Catholics that I know.