This is chaos

This post will mean nothing if you omit the final part.

With the girls institute, I had planned to draw some fruit with the girls. We had talked the week previous about the desire to spend some time drawing, so our OM team thought to practice still life--fruit--and use that to talk about the fruit of the Spirit in the Bible.

The girl most interested in drawing was in a fight with the three other girls. Intimidated, she didn't join us. The remaining girls feigned interest and were only wanting to draw the outlines of the fruit, as well as eat it when we finished. While I tried to teach how to shade (changing my entire lesson plan on the spot), it was to no avail.

We visited Maria Elena on Thursday night instead of Friday, because she wanted me to make fajitas for her again. She's busy this week with a fair, but offered to buy the food and to help (or have her friends she invited over in addition to us help) a little bit.

Unfortunately, they diced the onions. Not that big of a deal, but it's hard for the flavoring of the meat. It's better to keep the onions in long strips. Then there were the tortillas which Sarah and I worked hard on, but they needed more flour and so the women had to redo about half of our work. Oops.

Finally, there's el Refugio, at which I got to join Heather today for her dance class. Only one kid, Santi, showed up for the first 40 minutes (out of an hour), and then about half a dozen kids appeared with the expectation of learning what we had already practiced.

Three boys in particular were most adventuresome, wishing to yell and fight and run around without paying attention.

"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry," comes to mind. But I kept remembering something through all of these apparent failures. My God is bigger.

At the institute, I was able to find Jessica and give her a Bible. She seems interested in studying it together, which I might be able to do on Sunday afternoons, but I have to get permission with the director first. She showed me some of her drawings she's working on, and I remembered how sometimes when I read the Bible I think of drawing illustrations for it. A possibility.

At Maria Elena's I honestly didn't care as much. The food was given from the heart, and the redo on the tortillas just proves I have more to learn. In the end, delicious comida, and great conversation (only in Spanish!).

Finally, el Refugio. After coaching 20 young'ns basketball this past summer, I remembered some of the tricks for maintaing their short attention spans at a somewhat reasonable rate. In fact, I had a lot of fun with the challenge, as it were, only 3 boys who were most bothersome. We played about 5 different games in a 12 minute period before it was time for them to go again. While we still had a little horseplay, and I even had to wrestle one kid to get my house key back, I would say over all it went well.

"Chaos is often a prerequisite to new creation in Scripture. When we try prematurely to regain control of something chaotic there is a good chance we could undercut the very thing God is doing among us." Chau.