The Day of Tears

Hello, this is Gringo Landon,

Wow, another long adventurous day is complete and God still showed us things today.  We again traveled to the village we have been working with all week.  However today involved less breaking out of posts and concrete and more mixing concrete and filling up the holes we had made.  The work was tedious for those filling the holes and grueling hard for those mixing the concrete by hand.  Also today a few of us got to go find a basketball and play with some little kids and Eduardo. That was great!!! 

Thank you for all of you who gave gifts to the team to deliver to the people of Nicaragua. Last night we divided the gifts up evenly and packed them in plastic bags. So after all the work was done we gave the bags of gifts to all the different families that we got to know this week.

 Then the emotions started to flow. The people were so grateful to us and you; and strangely enough, though they had nothing and needed these things, they tried to give them back. We each gathered around our families and prayed for them and started to say our goodbyes. This was very hard to say goodbye to someone that we knew we would probably never see again.  This was especially hard on Madison and Jessica as they were granted the day to only interact with the children and play and love on them all morning. They climbed trees, sprinted up and down the paths, played tug-o-war, played on the playground equipment, shared the gospel, picked flowers, and CRIED. At some point today I think everyone was struck with some emotion of love and compassion and the desire to take the kids home with us.

This afternoon we traveled to an orphanage where we saw many very young children without loving parents.  This was the place where we all saw Mrs. Gardner’s and Mrs. VanWinkle’s love and compassion for small children.  At this place Mrs. Kneeland shared the story of Jesus calming the storm with all the little children, and then Mrs. VanWinkle shared the gospel with them too.

During devotionals Nathan shared about not being selfish and shared some of his random thoughts and his favorite Bible verses. Then Mr. Goede had us all share one thing to encourage the person next to us and something we saw in their lives this week that we appreciate. When it came to Jeremy’s turn to share about Rachel from Missouri he compared her to his orange pop saying, “You’ve got a bubbly personality; you remind me of home but with a little bit of an accent.  This pop tastes like Sunkist and is bubbly.  It reminds me of home but it’s got a bit of twang.”  J

For the team Landon Gossack