reminiscing

So I've had a rough past couple days. I have had a stomach virus, and just felt crappy on many different fronts. After resting all day, working a little bit on my senior project, I started to look over some of my old documents and I came across this one. I guess I have been struggling and reading this kinda picked me up, so I'm just gonna post it for fun. Hope you enjoy it. :]


Four Year Old Giovany Teaches a Lesson
The day I woke up from having the worst 3 hours of sleep I did not expect to have a great day. I also did not expect to learn about love from a four year old kid I couldn't communicate with.
I had a crick in my neck from sleeping on the chairs at church, and a sore throat from sleeping with my mouth open. The van ride wasn't that great either, I sat next to Stacy, who I was afraid of by the way. Everyone else got to sleep on the vans, but I had a seat on the far right so I would always fall off the edge if I tried to sleep.
So by the time we arrived at Saddleback Church I thought to myself, "God, is missions really the thing for me?". About two or three weeks before today I had signed myself up for Mexico Missions, and every Sunday I had to go to church to be briefed on how it was going to work and to get my weekly Spanish lessons. (By the way, I suck at Spanish).
Now we were departing from Saddleback and we were really going to Mexico, "No turning back now," I told myself. I had never been to Mexico, let alone another country. So I was curious as to what another country looked like. But once I saw the conditions I wished I was back home.
The orphanage we were going to was located in Tijuana. We passed by an area with bunkers and soldiers standing around with loaded machine guns. I really started wondering if missions was right for me.
By the time we got there I started becoming more optimistic. I felt a little more energized, and now that I was off the van of people I didn't know very well I could talk and hang out with my friends. The orphanage looked pretty nice. The people there were great people, taking in orphans who had been abandoned by the parents or whose parents had died from the conditions down in Tijuana.
Then we saw all the children playing and running around. Of course all the girls went and found the youngest and cutest kids to go play with. I was in the group that had the second youngest kids, ages three to six. My kid was an energetic little boy named Giovany. Some of the girls were jealous and tried to take him from he, he was darn cute.
But like I said before, this kid was pretty energetic. He was tough to keep in one spot for a period of time. During worship, we were supposed to sing and dance with our kids, but Giovany wanted to sing and move through the whole group. Once I tagged him down in one spot, he wanted to go up. Since he was just a four year old I decided putting him on my shoulders wouldn't be too much of a task. But when it was 95 degrees, and there were over 60 people cramped in that room I started sweating like a madman.
While I was singing praise songs in Spanish and dancing around dripping sweat I couldn't help but notice how happy all the children were. They were so eager to praise God. Giovany too, he was clapping his hands and using my head as a drum for beats, just having a great time during worship.
After worship was lunch, the cheeseburgers were pretty good. Then we had to do an activity with our kid, based on the age group. Giovany's group was making bracelets with the words "Jesus me amo". We made our bracelets pretty quickly, because he didn't want to just sit there. So when we finished I asked Angie Teacher if we could go play. So when she said yes he got so excited and grabbed my hand and just started pulling me somewhere.
I hadn't looked around the orphanage, so I had no idea where he was taking me. Once we got there I saw a little playground in a big sandbox. I figured a kid with his energy would've wanted to run and jump around on the playground and go on the slides and stuff. But he went straight for the swings, and asked me to push him.
So I did.
We were the only partners who weren't doing the activity with our groups, there was nobody outside around us barring a couple people passing by to use the bathrooms.
While I was pushing Giovany I started thinking about the conditions that these children were living in. The poverty around them, the corrupt government they had no idea about, the lack of parents. Yet still, they continued to praise God with their every action. I started to think about this feeling I had now for Giovany, and noticed he started repeating something to me.
"Mas rapido! Mas rapido!".
I figured that meant faster, so I pushed harder. He was really enjoying himself on the swings, he must have been on the swings for a good half hour and maybe even longer. Surprisingly he taught me so much in that short period of time, and he didn't even speak a single lick of English. I hardly understood anything he was saying in Spanish.
But he was speaking a language that almost everyone knows. He was speaking with the language of love.
Giovany taught me that love cannot be contained. He told me that no barriers can hold in love, not different languages, not poverty, nothing.
He told me that love conquers all.