Dia International de la Mujer

Have you ever woke up one random morning and found that the entire day was a celebration for you?

Colombia has some cool holidays that don't exist in America. One of them is the International Day for Women on March 8th. It's just a day to celebrate us. At 5am the boys of the base played and sang to us from the hallway. Every morning we have a devotional time where one student presents an attribute of God, so this day all of the guys together presented God's amazing creativity in making the woman: his best creation. At breakfast Juan Daniel read a poem he wrote that was also an acrostic for "Mujer." In the night they had a presentation where they played songs for us, gave us all flowers, chocolate and dishes of ice cream and took turns either reciting a poem or telling us why they appreciate us. (Note that we have 23 women in the house and only 14 men to do all of this). It was just such a beautiful day. Desteni and I didn't know it was coming until we woke up in the morning. We love God for blessing us with these little surprises!

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This week has been an amazing break through. Last week the staff felt like there was climaxing tension with disrespect and breaking rules and little arguments breaking out among the students. Something changed this week. Now there is like a climaxing of growth and maturity that we haven't seen before. Oh thank you God!

My favorite example of this, and about the cutest story ever: Juan Daniel is obviously the cutest guy student, so of course the girls flirt with him. He's been called out on his behavior in response a couple of times by the staff. This week he was sitting outside and playing guitar with a group of people. One girl came and sat really close to him, but I didn't want to call them out for that. Then she laid her head on his shoulder. Juan Daniel immediately leaned his head towards hers to acknowledge her and then gently lifted his shoulder so that she would sit up straight again. He didn't even know that I was watching, but I saw and told all of the staff. I couldn't believe he went from a flirtatious dreamboat to such a responsible leader overnight. And then later that same day I had a prophecy for him about his calling to be a leader for men in his teaching, examples, worship, and relationships. When I told him how proud I was of his example with the girl he even teared up because he had been feeling like he had just been doing one wrong thing after another. God is just so faithful to tell us what we need to hear to grow closer to him.

These kind of things have been happening with a lot of our students, even some of the real troublemakers. Please pray that it doesn't just happen once but that it's the start of a change within our community, that our students will be ready to be leaders on outreach.

God's been doing this for the staff too. There were some negative things happening among us that was hurting our unity. But this week has been the turning point in that as well.

For me personally God made this week beautiful by talking through me. Sometimes I let doubts creep into my mind and wonder what I'm doing here or if I can really help anyone. And then in a time of ministering to our students God gave me a specific word for four of our students (one of them being Juan Daniel). I don't know who I am that God would decide to talk through me; it's just another one of those amazing blessings I can't adequately say "thank you" for.