Random thoughts

This is probably about as random as they get since it is 12:30am, and I am wide awake since I went to bed "to pray" at 7:30pm and got quite a bit of "prayer sleep".

Yesterday we had an "impacto" here in the slum, an interchurch event that took place in the Cafezal plaza up the hill, near the health post. It was great to see the pastors from different churches working together to lead this rather unstructured, Spirit-led preaching/worship service in the middle of the public park.

I made chocolate chip cookies again this weekend...I seem to have more friends everyday. ;)

God doesn't tell us things just for the sake of telling us - He always has a purpose in what He tells us, He tells us what we need to know.

I'm in the process of asking God why He has told me some of the things that He has told me, what He wants me to do with that information.

Sometimes He tells us things just so we can pray about them, sometimes because we need to tell someone else, or sometimes because we need to do something about what He told us.

I miss carpet, the way it feels to walk on it barefoot.

Brazilians don't really say brrrrrrrrrrrrrr when they are cold, and now that the winter months are rolling in, I catch myself naturally saying it, sometimes rather loud...I must look kind of crazy. I have surveyed the other foreigners to make sure it is not just an American expression, and have found that Dutch and German people say brrrrr but with a heavy roll on the R but English people say brrr like I do, more like "bur" with no R roll.

I'm almost done reading Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider. I highly recommend it. It is re-inspiring me in my vision and big-picture calling, but also personally challenging me in some areas.

Sometimes I wake up thinking in Portuguese now...

Agora eu sei como trocar o idioma de meu teclado então dá para digitar em português se eu quiser. Tambêm agora sei como escrever melhor por causa de meu curso de português.

It's hard to talk/write in Spanish now because it is so similar to Porgutuese, I need to train myself to switch better.

One girl from my group who was really starting to show improvement was suddenly taken by the police to live with her mom on the other side of the city, due to her father abusing them. I hope she's doing okay, though I have heard the man living with her mom is abusive as well. We're sad we can't work with this girl any more...she was so closed at the beginning of the year that she would never talk and if we tried to talk with her personally, she would turn her head, shut down completely, and never look us in the eye. Just before being taken away, she had come so far that she was participating in all of the activities, enjoying herself, trying to write whenever we do written work (she doesn't know how or has some disability), and not only able to talk to us and look us in the eye, but also courageous enough to stay after to talk to us about some struggles she was having with other girls in the group. This girl and her siblings are so precious but have been through so much...I really feel God's heart for them.

Okay...I'm going back to bed now.

Lessons from Chocolate Chip Cookies

Some of you may remember reading a blog I wrote just over a year ago regarding my first attempt to make chocolate chip cookies here in Brazil during my time as a volunteer at the girls’ house. Basically I struggled to find some of the ingredients and accidentally ended up using yeast rather than baking soda, and it didn’t come out looking anything like normal cookies (but the girls still ate it). Since then I have not been brave enough to try baking much of anything here in Brazil, but this week I decided to give chocolate chip cookies another try as I learned the proper words for all of the ingredients and I wanted to make something special to serve at the 15th birthday party of one of the girls in my group. I still faced the challenge of a gas oven with no temperature gauge and a few improvisations in terms of ingredients, yet by some miracle they turned out absolutely perfect! I still wasn’t sure what the girls would think of them as chocolate chip cookies basically don’t exist here. To my surprise, when the girls tried them, they were shocked that I had made them because they thought they were professionally made. They asked for the recipe and even though I told them I just got it off of the internet, they determined my cooking was good enough that I can get married. (Here in Brazil it is normal to tell a single woman she can get married if her food is good – I like to say the same to single men to single things out a bit.)
After the birthday party was over and the four dozen cookies had been consumed in a matter of minutes, God used this experience to speak to me about my own progress since first arriving here in Brazil. When I first got here, I didn’t know hardly anything about the language, how to find my way around the city, where to buy things, how to cook, clean, and use appliances, etc. But after a year, this is really my home now. I know how to get around the city without getting lost (most of the time!), I know how to speak the language well, I know how to use so many things that were very foreign to me at first. Something that I failed at a year ago, I not only succeeded but excelled at now! Although there are still challenges with living here and navigating in a foreign culture, I have come a really long way in the past year and am now capable of mastering things I was completely clueless regarding before.