Belize 2016 Day 4
(Recap of Worship Night)
Last night’s Night of Worship was amazing. It started off with some local worship groups with dancing, flag waving, jumping for joy and just plain worshipping the Lord. What many would perceive as strange in the States is quite amazing to witness. Just plain carefree worship. One of the worship groups was from the church in Belmopan, the place we visited last year. It was great to see those that have never played a chord in their lives on stage playing worship music with skill. One year has brought so much. One of the local Belmopan students from last year was onstage last night leading worship, what an amazing voice! At this same time last year, he was in a very depressed state and hardly ever spoke, now he is praising God in front of many. It is great to see how far he has come.
We started our day with another excellent breakfast of Johnny Cakes. All of our meals have been prepared and served to us by Pastor Jaffa, his wife, and their children. It isn't often that you get to experience the kind of joyful serving that they have been showing us this week. They are quite an incredible family!
After breakfast we met in the church as a group to recap the last few days. Many affirmations were given to members of the team. It was reiterated several times about how nice it was to have such a great group of people, some of which have never even met, work so well together. We also reflected a little on Psalms 40:3 which reads, “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord.”
We received an update about Miss Charlotte’s house this morning. We have so far raised approximately $1000 dollars to help her rebuild her house. It would be amazing to see our GFG friends and family able to completely fund her repairs. She has such hope and joy in spite of losing almost everything she owns.
We have been able to bless two individuals so far with new guitars. One to Pastor Jerome who drove 4 hours to get here. He is following a vision that God gave him 5 years ago to go and minister to people through worship in southern Belize. With the lack of resources his vision wavered, but through prayer and the Lord’s leading he is now fully devoted to this mission. God has generously blessed him with a van and GFG was able to provide him with a guitar to further the mission of worship around the world!
We also met Marvin who leads vocally in his church and doesn’t currently know how to play any instruments. He has the desire to learn guitar in order to help him with leading worship. He has a tender heart and loves the Lord. He teaches here at Kings Park High School where we are staying.
Next we went into the town for some Choli’s. This is basically an iced coffee drink with tiny ice chunks (like a Dunkin Donuts Coolata). It has ice cream and whipped cream on top. It’s a nice little novelty down here and is very refreshing when the real-feel temperatures this week have been reaching upwards of 115 degrees.
The rest of our day continued with more music lessons, electives and fellowship. It’s great to see people sticking around at the end of a session not wanting to leave. They just want to stay and learn as much as they can while we are here. Our audio/visual elective was not offered today and we were approached by a couple of students to ask why. Two of the team members immediately stepped up and pulled it together to teach it again. It was great to see how flexible, yet again, our team has been this week.
It’s hard to believe that the last day of our ministry is upon us already.