God is not a slot machine

But He sure has done an AMAZING job at answering prayers.  Whether it’s for His strength, love, peace, patience, deeper relationships, a feeling of purpose, better relations with my teammates, contentment, the desire to feel present, connecting with the guardians, getting to lead, getting to follow, understanding the gospel, believing in Him, and even asking Him to draw people in… He continues to remind me that He HEARS me and when I am walking with Him and ask in His name, He will provide.

This week has been AMAZING.  Whereas I had gotten into a bad habit of counting down the days until I got home (not that I was super homesick or unhappy, I would just think about landing in the Atlanta airport and getting to see people and I would re-check the date for the 3^rd time that day), now every morning I wake up and I’m like “Shoot, I only have 5 Sunday’s left”, or “I get to see these guardians 5 more times.  How the HECK are we supposed to best equip them in that short period of time?”

As always, I have no idea how to structure my thoughts, so we’ll go with bullet points of the 

HIGHLIGHTS of the week.

• I found out there’s an autism center a 5 minute walk from our house.  Britt and I are going to go check it out on Monday: I have no idea what it’s gonna be like or if the people even speak English, but we’re gonna try.
• On Monday we went to ICS and I got to run. My body has finally adjusted to the climate/lack of pressure here, so I didn’t feel like I was going to die. It was kind of nice.
• Monday part 2: we decided we were going to divide and conquer Ethiopia.  When we were planning out our schedules for the summer, we realized that we were trying to do a lot, and the 4 of us trying to invest everywhere wasn’t going to be effective.  So Rudy and I are going to Ambo on Weds. and Fridays, and then we’ll help out with Burayu on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but kind of be the background people. (MOMMA I hope you caught that – I was the one that suggested that we divide and conquer because we were spreading ourselves too thin.  20 years later and I finally learned a lesson :] )
• Tuesday was tough – I realized how much I find value/purpose in being able to lead: I spent the day watching Katie teach the guardians and Katie/Rudy teach English, and I wanted SO badly to just step in and take over.  They were doing a GREAT job, I just felt useless.
• Kind of contradicting that, the one thing I DID do on Tuesday was get to teach the kids a song about professions.  We made it to the tune of the GT Fight Song and everything :]  Miller Templeton would be so proud. 

“When I grow up I want to be

A driver or a soldier or a painter I could be

A pilot or a teacher, or an engineer!

When I grow up I want to be”

(you have to REALLY adjust it to the tune, but it works, I promise.  Make sure you add hand motions too) The kids kind of have a hard time with it, but we have 4 weeks to get to video-worthy material.

•  WEDNESDAY ROCKED. Slash was the most humbling day I’ve had yet.  It was our first “solo” day in  Ambo, and other than our driver being 2.5 hours late, it was a GREAT day.  The staff had scheduled home visits for the morning, so even though we had to shorten them because we were late, it was still amazing.  I loved getting to go with a smaller group – we got to interact with the guardians on a more personal level and ask them more specific questions about their lives/the program.  It’s amazing what a difference visiting their home makes in establishing a deeper connection with the guardians– by welcoming us into their homes, they’re letting us into the most personal part of their lives.  It made me want to spend all day hanging out at their homes, getting to know them, loving on their kids, and watching them as they work.  Most of them work straight out of their homes (it was pretty funny… the first house we walked into was a bar (aka a sitting area outside the woman’s house where she served alcohol).  One of the first things we do is pray over the house, so I think the men at the “bar” felt awkward (it was 10:30 in the morning and they were already drinking.  I didn’t think it was Spring Break, but maybe it’s different on the Ethiopian calendar)). I left feeling really overwhelmed with emotions that I couldn’t really describe – I was so humbled, but I also felt so loved/welcomed/appreciated – it was a weird mix, but pretty neat.

o   Guardian training was AMAZING.  We had 3 groups come back-to-back, and I had the opportunity to lead the last group.  It was phase 2 of Marnie being humbled for the day: I’m a much better teacher in my head than I am on the spot.  It’s WAY harder to engage a group than I expected and trying to think for them and challenge them on the spot is difficult.  It’s kind of like when you’re watching someone play a word game: you can always pick out WAY more words when you’re watching someone else play than when you’re the one racing against the clock (maybe that’s just me, but still).  Maybe it’s because I’m “assigned” Ambo for the summer, but I felt a connection with the guardians that I didn’t feel with the Burayu women.  It was powerful getting to teach them/hear their visions for themselves and their group’s future businesses, because all of the sudden I wanted to do EVERYTHING in my power to help them succeed.  They became REAL guardians with REAL families that they have to provide for with REAL struggles but with REAL hopes, instead of just women who are part of a sponsorship program.  I left feeling burdened with the responsibility to ensure that they succeeded.

•  THURSDAY ROCKED TOO but in a much different way.  Thanks to reading “Kisses from Katie” (an autobiography about a high school graduate who moves to Uganda to serve and is now 23 with 13 adopted kids – don’t worry Dad, I’m not correlating this to my life, it’s just a good read) and seeing my purpose/value in being here this summer, I felt SO much free-er (is that even a word?) to serve from the background.  This translated to dedicating myself to simply loving as many people as I could with everything that I had, with the hope that they could better understand the kind of love God has for them.  Katie Davis (author of “Kisses from Katie”) points out that people aren’t able to understand God’s love when they’ve never been loved themselves, so my goal on Thursday was just to hug as many kids as I could, hold as many hands as possible, and pour myself out so that everyone I interacted with knew that they were loved.  I still did a pretty crappy job of it (especially with the people on my team), but it was really cool being able to try to ONLY serve through loving, and not through leading/doing/teaching.  I know it sounds trivial, but I get so caught up in doing and forget that loving people is just as important, so it was a cool challenge to have loving be my only responsibility.
• FRIDAY was another amazing day in Ambo.  Each of the guardian groups had INCREDIBLE visions for themselves (one group wants to make a construction materials shop, another plans to breed cows to sell milk, and the third wants to make a space to grind spices).  It was cool because they were so far more advanced than we had expected, but they still have such a long way to go in meeting their visions.  I know nothing about what it looks like to start a business, but I never realized that skills that I take for granted (reading, writing, forming a budget, figuring out what I need, brainstorming, etc.) are skills that most of the guardians have never developed (in 1 group, 3 out of the 20 knew how to read/write).  This also means that I can challenge them in creating short-term steps and teach them how to think outside the box to raise money– aka I can help them reach their goals.

o   I also got to teach English by myself (Rudy got pulled out right as we were stepping into the first classroom for a meeting with a guardian), so I walked in to Grades 3 & 4 with no translator.  It was AWESOME. The kids were way more well-behaved and seemed to know more English, so after I realized they knew their colors/most of the professions, we worked on conversations about them.  For example, most of them know the colors, but they don’t understand the question “What is your favorite color?” So we practiced talking to each other and answering questions… it was REALLY fun.  Again, it was a TOTAL “Think on the spot” time.  I was humbled (for the bajilionth time this week) because I realized while I was teaching how much I took from watching other people teach – it reminded me how important it was to sit back and let other people lead sometimes, because I have SO much to learn from others. 

That’s the end of my novel for now.  I could write 10,000 other things, but hopefully this makes up for not having posted in a week.  Grand summary: this week rocked. It’s been humbling and exciting and frustrating and terrifying, but it’s been also been a week of realizing how fun it is getting to rely on God and let Him lead instead of trying to lead myself.  He has way bigger plans than I do.