Distractions

I'm sorry it's been so long since I posted! We've had quite a few things thrown our way the past two weeks, so I haven't had much of a chance for any updates.

Things are going well. We just finished with a group from Bloomington, IL. There were some great conversations that I was able to have with several of the girls and really encourage and challenge them. VBS was great and the kids who came were so cute. Work projects were a lot of fun: we poured a sidewalk for one of the churches we work with and then painted a shed, started building a playset, and did some weeding for the other church we work with. Backpacking went a lot better this time, which is an encouraging thought for our third and final wilderness adventure which starts in about 5 days. I'm loving my time out here. I absolutely love the other staff I'm working with and the students who come on the trips. It's sad to think that I only have two more teams and then I'm done. I wish it was longer.

As I stated above, we've encountered a few unexpected things in our time here.
- Getting kicked out of the library out of the blue meant Abby and I are now sleeping in the balcony of the gym. Not much privacy, to say the least.
- One day we couldn't turn on the lights in the gym, and when they finally came on we couldn't turn them off when it was time for bed = Abby and I slept in sunglasses that night.
- We couldn't get internet access until recently when we'd been expecting to have it for the whole summer.
- The sand and gravel we needed for concrete didn't get delivered when it was supposed to, so we had to put that project on hold.
- The night before backpacking we discovered that a good amount of our wilderness food had been stolen.
- Steven (trip leader) got randomly got pretty sick two days before backpacking.
- Beth (Steven's wife) was sick the next day.
- Our van started making really weird noises when Abby and I went into town to get some last minute supplies. We were 40 miles from "home" and had no cell phone service.
- One of the church's vans got stuck in mud, so the youth pastor, Abby and I had to try and push it out, then go look for help since it was just the three of us.
- Abby felt sick while backpacking and was not in good shape yesterday.
- We had to replace our brake pads in the van.
- Last night we discovered a group from the Native American Assembly will be staying in the school for several days. This was the first we had been informed of this.

The four of us have joked, saying to each other "Satan", every time something goes wrong. We even named one of the corners of our sidewalk "Satan's corner" because it took FOREVER to get the right way and things kept going wrong. But as much as we've joked about Satan being behind all of this, I think there's a lot of truth in it.

One of our leadership principles that we teach students is "Focus Precedes Success" and we talk about how when we're not focused on our goals and not that committed, then it's going to be a lot harder to achieve anything. One illustration that Abby and I used when we taught it was a Jenga game. We had one group really focused trying to build as high as possible while another group told them the wrong way to do things and just yelled general nonsense. The group that was supposed to be focused wasn't able to reach their goal because they got so off task by listening to those who were distracting.

We feel like a lot of these unexpected things that have happened are meant as distractions to keep us off our task of impacting this community and the students who come our way. It has been very tempting to give into frustration with each thing that has happened, but luckily we've been able to make it through by continually encouraging and supporting each other.

If you could be praying for us through this time, we would all really appreciate it. We are all worn down and trying to recover for our last two teams. It's been hard, but it's been good. There's nothing else I would have rather spent my summer doing.