Day 6: Standard Deviation

Today we did all the things!

After the harvestization we saw yesterday, we went back to the Uni today for our outreach, and God continued to do crazy work. Cammy and I teamed up today (Cammy is the lead sister from my homegroup, as Sheryl said, "she just loves everyone so well"). We ran the gamut of people one might encounter doing outreach: an atheist, a believer, a person of peace and a salvation. Yea, I said that - a salvation. That's the best one, so I'mma talk about that one first: We saw a guy sitting by himself in front of a facultad, so we started talking to him. He was waiting for his novia, but he was still in highschool. We dug into the gospel: our separation from God, our brokenness as humans, our inability to earn God's love by going to church or doing good works and the beauty of Christ's sacrifice for our sake. He said he felt separated from God and prayed to give his heart to God - it was so beautiful guys, I, like, literally, can't even.

For those of you who remember (because i operate under the assumption that everyone reads my blogs, (whoa, is that a link?) since i'm famous), we have a history of meeting persons of peace in bathrooms. So, today, Cammy met a girl named Cecilia, who is involved in a Christian church here. She was super sweet and spoke some English and opened up to us about her life. It was super encouraging for us both.

We ate lunch with Sophia (who is just...too cute), the daughter of the family I lived with in 2011. She's 7 now, the first thing she said to me today was: "my mom and I prayed for a girl today because she was sad." At lunch she told me, "I do karate now!" So, lunch was adorable.

After our outreach today, we played on Craig's slackline and then went to get tacos de trompo at a restaurant Mario knows. It was superrico. So, so good. Remind me to talk later about how awesome Mario is.

Tonight we contacted all the people we met on Facebook and hung out and dyed our hair blue and Kaylen opened her life up and shared her testimony with us. Her vulnerability was really encouraging and took the team to a place of deeper unity. Now we're hanging out, enjoying that we're all weird and stuff.

I've pretty firmly decided that everyone ever is really weird. "Normal" being defined as the average personality of everyone, with a dash of cultural values thrown in. But nobody actually fits that, so everyone is weird. But, we're allowed and expected to have a small amount of quirkiness, so long as we don't deviate too far from the norms. But, people do. We're all really, really weird (Shia Surprise! See, that's weird). The thing that is hard is that we don't want to admit it. So, we show our acceptable weirdness - our carefully chosen quirks - and hope people don't see past that. That's one thing that I love about the church; we find our identity in Christ and can be comfortable with being the goofballs God made us to be. So, we let more of it show...and we're accepted and loved anyway. So, we can create a culture where people get to be themselves and we get to know them more. And, the more we know people, the more we love them. And the more we love them, the more they let us know them.

So, pray for our parties tomorrow, that the connections will happen, that the right people will come, etc...