“Hey, there’s another cockroach!” I say to Sarah Jane as we watched our late night buddy scurry drunkenly across our brightly light kitchen floor. “I just threw its friend out about 4 minutes ago. This one looks like he’s on his way out too….” Knowing that cockroaches only come out to die, I wasn’t surprised to find him on his back this morning with his long legs sticking straight up in a surrender stance. Funny the things you get used to here. Ant parades through the house, cockroaches doing their dirty dance, insects in your food, being locked in resource rooms with the only way out being a metal door, toner exploding in your face, and random electric outages that keep the teacher from showing the planned video for the day! We’re on our toes even more than Michael Jordan in his glory days!
In the midst of all the hustle this week (tests, correcting test, recycling projects, meetings…), I headed to the church middle school night a bit tired. Josh had the fantastic idea of having the high school kids from church lead a young life like thing for the middle school group this week as a way of giving back what they have learned and being servants. We had about 8 show up at the beginning and they led the wonder bread-eating contest, the live cricket spitting contest (I in fact, improved my previous record…of course it wasn’t too difficult since my last attempt had my long legged friend flying only about 2 feet), and other random games. Then a couple of the kids shared how God has been involved in their lives lately. Jose told of how he just moved from the Philippines as a senior and how hard it was for him to fit in…God became his confidant and friend. Then Carly shared (remember, these are Jr high kids listening) about her grandma just being diagnosed with breast cancer and how she is in torture as she tries to deal with it half a world away with her mom and brother gone in the states. This tomboy champion swimmer started to cry in front of these kids as she shared how God has met her in her hard place. WOW!!! It was awesome!
Then on Saturday morning as I ate an incredible banana pancake with 2 other high school girls we talked about giving testimonies. They said that they don’t have a testimony… not a remarkable one anyway. We went through people in the Bible and how God changed their lives radically…we saw that in each case it was His work, not the individual. To say that what God did in our lives isn’t remarkable is slapping God in the face…saying that His creation of us both in our first birth and in our new birth is just an everyday unremarkable thing…not the full out angel shout party that it is…man, all of heaven rejoices, that’s a lot of noise and excitement! God’s work is remarkable in each one of us! We all have a testimony and God should be working in our lives both in the good times and the bad. Man, if only I can remember that as I go through each day.