I was in New Mexico and saw God work around me through:
- The Lown family that played basketball with the camp staff kids and helped create encouraging Easter Cards for the youth that were to come later.
- The youth pastor that came in joyously at 2am on the first night as I was half fell asleep on the couch of the lobby in the M-lodge waiting and praying for a safe arrival.
- As we covered Broken Arrow in prayer. Never going to forget when we were in a ravine and the wind was blowing, a student was praying and another student said “God’s saying thank you!”
- As the students jumped right in to serve the Ranch in: scooping poo at the horses stable, re-doing the rifle range, placing a foundation for the archery range, vamping up a part of their team building low ropes course, moving lots of tires, moving lots of 8 ft. rail-road ties, painting the horses fences and barrels, brushed the horses, assisting an elderly Navajo family castrate their sheep, and leading a children program for a boarding school.
- As students prayed over each other daily.
- As the students and group leaders encouraged me through notes and cards daily.
I want you all to know that this project week was probably one of the smoothest weeks of projects I’ve led. What a blessing it was to receive encouragement from the group daily. If you’ve been following my blog I asked that you would be praying for me and if any of you feel led to call me while on project. Well, when I got to the location I found out there was no reception. However daily I was encouraged by the community of the Broken Arrow Ranch, the students of San Ramon church, and the Lown family.
Many have been asking about the day we were castrating sheep. There was an elderly Christian Navajo family that needed help with castrating their sheep. We physically did NOT castrate the sheep. What we did was herd the sheep and then hold the sheep while they were castrated. Was this messy? Sometimes it was very messy! There was the grandma and grandpa with face masks just hacking away- they had 5 pens of lambs. It took about 2 hours with 30 people. Of course not everyone participated in holding the sheep- they castrated and cut off tails. I am going to confess I just herded the sheep and did take some videos of it- (it was such a cultural experience). We had probably 6 participants that stayed in the vans or went to the vans after seeing the first few. After, the Navajo family invited our large group to their small home to make homemade Navajo fried flat bread- it was great! We took a small hike to some American Indian ruins as well.
The best part of the whole trip though was Sunday when the groups weren’t there yet and the Worship leader and I went to a very small Navajo church with about 12 attendee’s. We arrived at the church and weren’t sure it was the one- asked someone in the area and they said it was the church we were looking for. We then asked them when service is they said 10am and it was 10:15am, he said, “no one’s here yet though” this is normal in the area. Church started about 11am we met the pastor he asked us to introduce ourselves and then told us it’s custom newcomers do the sermon- we thought he was joking. After singing some beautiful hymns accompanied by a young girl in her early teens singing in the Navajo language the pastor said that the church had a “treat.” He announced us and said that Joey, the worship leader would be preaching. I felt so bad- the worship leader came up with something out of the whim about Easter and what the Lord had been teaching him- he did a great 7min sermon. Haha. The pastor preached we had a very interactive sermon and then we had fellowship time after. We had mutten stew which is well known in those parts, it has no taste- brown broth, with chili, and sheep. Navajo’s use all parts of the sheep and we were eating “puff balls of fat” I’m not going to lie it was kind of gross. I don’t think I ever ate anything like that overseas that weird- haha.
Thank you for your prayers all! 🙂
The Lown Family: Andrea, Ethan, Emma, Rick
