DStilled

School’s Out For The Summer

June 27, 2005 on 1:18 am | In Blog |

Happy Summer Break everyone! That’s right, Shalom School is on vacation for the next two weeks. With the way they do school, the major break is in the late fall and our “winter break” is now. It amazes me that I’ve already been here for almost four weeks. I now have less time ahead of me here than behind. Wow. I bet a lot of people are realizing this about the summer as a whole too. (Yes I’m aware summer officially started like 5 days ago)

I just got my tax refund back and have made my first purchase. Jars of Clay has a members only double cd that they put on sale and I bought it. A couple of years ago they did a concert in Nashville with an orchestra playing a bunch of songs from the first two albums. I’m hype for it. I also just acquired the first demo album they put out BEFORE the self-titled cd that everyone knows about.

Well, now that I’ve got all this free time I need to use it well. Sam, Jennie, I, and others are going to Antigua, to a volcano, and some other fun things but that’s not what I meant. I want to take advantage of the time to prepare for my last bit teaching and leading devotionals. I REALLY want to preach in Spanish a couple of times before I have to leave. That means that I not only have to do preaching preparation but I really have to work hard on my Spanish flow and pronunciation. I can get Ivan to help me translate some notes before I go on.

Last Saturday Jennie and I gave our testimonies at the young adult meeting for Shalom, Fusion. Both of us had Ivan translate for us and everything went smoothly. For Mon and Wed Devos I headed up an obra or a skit. Well, one of the guys that was supposed to be in the skit didn’t show up because of a miscommunication and I performed in his stead. That’s right, I have officially done drama in two languages. It was fun and people laughed so I think it went over well. On Monday right after Mark finished speaking, I felt as though I should stop trying to listen to everything in Spanish that was happening and just pray. So I bowed my head and had one of the most powerful and intense prayer times I had in a long time. I let loose everything inside of me and poured it out onto the kids. After about 8 minutes the Devo was over and I lifted up my head and saw over 20 students standing up front after making some form of decision or commitment. Praise God!

On Thursday, the kids had their last day of school but for the sixth graders it was retreat day. Every grade gets a retreat to this cool hotel with a pool for one day during the year and the last day of school was the sixth graders’ turn. Jennie, Corey, Melissa, and I all went to help out. I headed up organized game time and shouted out things in Spanish to kids who laughed at me and pointed to one of the leaders to help translate. Much of the day was spent in the pool. Us leaders joined in and had fun. MAN did the cool water feel great! We played chicken fight, toss the sixth grader, and a form of water polo. Jennie got to spend some quality time with a girl that we all prayed for because she seems to be at the stage where God is something she might be interested in.

Friday was Teacher Appreciation Day and Mark went all out for his hard working soldiers. The day started off with a bus ride from the Shalom to Mark’s neighborhood’s country club. We had a worship service with Sam and Jennie leading up the music and Mark led some sharing time about the year thus far. Then we went to M & A’s gym for a hard endurance Tae Bo/Kickboxing class. We were all sore Sat morn. After some futbol we went back for lunch and two games. One of which was Musical Chairs. Then all those who wanted went bowling. Sam beat everyone because we were playing with bumpers. He nailed like three strikes after hitting the bumpers! The following day was Rueben’s birthday party with Ivan and Sam as clowns and a giant #2 pinata. Ahhh…the vacationed life.