A week ago today our youth group loaded up and headed to Scranton, Pennsylvania not really knowing what lay ahead. Today we are on the road home. A lot has happened in the week between our road trips. We have worshiped. We have worked. We have laughed, cried, and experienced many emotions in between. We have met new friends and we have deepened relationships with the people we came with. We have seen the face of God in our co-workers and in the people in whose homes we worked.

On Friday we finished up the work on our projects. For my work crew it was a time of touching up work that we missed and saying goodbye to our host couple, Rose and Jim. For me our conversation evolved into something deeper. As the week had progressed I had learned the they had a grandson who had recently died by suicide. For the first half of the week Jim was in the hospital so we really hadn’t had the opportunity to talk much. On Friday, with our work completed and a little more relaxed time on our hands, I found myself sitting in Rose and Jim’s kitchen talking about Jim’s surgery, work, and their grandson.

One of the sad realities of having two children die is that I am often put in a position to reach out to other bereaved parents and grandparents. On this day I was able to share with this recently bereaved couple as they were trying to make sense of their loss and as they were trying to find some way of coping and moving forward. They are very fresh in their grief so healing is still a little way off. I was, however, able to affirm with them the intensity of their loss and how inadequate our understanding of these situations can be. More importantly, I was able to help them know that I cared and also that God was still with them in this tragic time.

So, I spent a week painting their deck and porch. I helped hang some handrails and a safety light. We washed and cleaned a little around their house. But it is, perhaps, this conversation and the prayer that followed that may be the most important work that I did this week. The human connection that makes sense of all the brush strokes and driving screws.

When I think of this week, I probably won’t think of the work on their house. It is possible the work on rebuilding their home life I was able to help with as I sat with them in their grief was more significant. This soul building may be the most important memory I will have of the week.

Yesterday our theme in worship and the small group lessons centered around relationships and how important they are to our life of faith. Today, at our work site, God seemed to be bringing that message home.

For the past few days my crew has been struggling a little bit to complete our assigned tasks: painting a deck, painting some wrought iron porch railings, hanging a safety light, and hanging a stairway handrail. Part of our difficulty involved having the wrong supplies. It took us more than a day to get the correct color of stain and it wasn’t until this morning that we finally had the railing, stain, and hardware all in place so we could move forward on what seemed like a simple project. Our group was a little discouraged about the slow progress we were making.

That all changed today when we not only got all of our materials straightened out but also discovered that we were being assigned another crew to work with us. This crew had completed their tasks and were reassigned to our project. It was just the lift we needed. With the additional six workers and, maybe more importantly, with the renewed enthusiasm they bought, we were able to complete all our tasks before the end of the work day.

Projects like this are good reminders of the importance of welcoming help. We could probably have persevered and finished everything by Friday afternoon but the synergy of the two groups working together not only made us more productive it also gave us a renewed energy. We are looking forward to our final day actually exceeding our expectations of the past couple of days.

It was just a reminder – God wants us to work in partnership with one another. Sometimes that means we are the helper and sometimes it means we are the helped. We give thanks for our work partners today and pray we are able to lighten someone else’s load in the future!

So, a confession right off the bat – I had expected to publish this blog daily during work camp but we have been so busy and I have been so tired that I haven’t made good on that commitment. The program for work camp starts with breakfast at 7:00 AM and ends with team devotions finishing around 10:00 PM. In between there are large group teaching and worship times, work, and some early evening free time.

As the week has begun the emphasis has moved from the group you came with (St. Mark’s Cornerstone Youth) to your crew which consists of five our six people you work with and spend time with during worship and devotions. My crew is pictured with this blog and includes people from Connecticut and Maryland. I am the lone Midwesterner.

Our work has primarily involved painting at the home of a woman named Rosemary. Rosemary’s husband is in the hospital and she has some physical limitations. Besides the painting we are also installing a safety light by the front door and some rails on stairs to help make life safer for Rosemary and her husband. We have enjoyed getting to know her and she has been very appreciative of the work that we are doing.

During the week our crew becomes vital to the camp experience. It is interesting to see how divergent group shares a common belief in Jesus Christ while often having very different approaches to life and the work we are doing. This morning in our teaching and worship time we were challenged to memorize John 13:35. (“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”) The challenge is then to live out that verse as we spend our day together serving Jesus and our neighbor, especially the resident of the house we are working on.

While we are far from perfect, both in our home repairs and our loving actions toward one another, we know that we continue to strive to do our best and God blesses our efforts.

On Sunday we arrived at our work camp site and began to get organized for the week ahead. There are around four hundred participants in this camp including a group from one church that includes around 120 people! St. Mark’s is well represented in the leadership of the week. Don Broad, our Director of Student Ministries, is one of the main presenters, Abby Macomber is leading worship, and we have a number of other St. Marker’s in leadership roles.

This week we will not only be getting to know each other better but we will also be introduced to a significant group of people from other churches in other states. We also will be working for and with residents in Scranton as we serve and learn.

Sunday was also a day filled with worship. Even though some of the activities were organizational in nature and sometimes playful, God’s Spirit was evident in all that we were doing. We ended the day with a devotional time with just our group which was moving and inspirational. It will be a joy to see how God works this week!

This morning I slept in church. That is to say that I slept in a church last night and woke up this morning sleeping in Martin Luther Lutheran Church in Youngstown, Ohio. I am traveling with our high school students and adult leaders to participate in a mission camp in Scranton, Pennsylvania this week. We left Carmel yesterday and we will arrive at the place we will call home for the week early this afternoon.

I woke up before dawn this morning as I often do. I moved downstairs and sat in the sanctuary in the complete darkness. It was amazing to watch the dawn from this vantage point as the light began to make the stained glass windows in the beautiful 1930s sanctuary come alive.

In many ways this was a metaphor for what we hope happens this week in the lives of not only the campers but also the adults who work and share this adventure. It is our prayer that the light of Jesus shines through and people’s lives are changed. I look forward to sharing this week. I look forward to getting some useful work done that will help people have a better life. But most importantly, I pray that the light of Jesus will shine in and through our team as we try to be agents of God’s love and grace.

A few weeks ago I had my hearing checked because I had noticed a difference in how things sounded when I listened with my right ear versus how they sounded when I listened with my left ear.  To be more precise, when I had a phone to my right ear I could not hear the lower overtones as well as I could with my left ear.  As a musician, I really worried about having my hearing compromised, which would be a huge loss.

As it turned out my hearing is within normal range except that I have one frequency in the lower register that I can no longer hear with my right ear. The technician that gave me the test said that it is not unusual for people to have this kind of selective hearing loss but that it was a little unusual that someone would notice such a specific loss.  She said that musicians were more likely to notice this kind of loss than people who were not trained musicians.

When you are a college music major one of the things that are a part of your curriculum is “ear training.”  This is a combination of musical dictation, sight singing, and listening to musical excerpts, that helps you learn how to listen and what to listen for.  It is this intentional program of learning how to listen that helps musicians hear what they need to when they are performing so that they can make the many minute adjustments that contribute to an artful performance.

In a lot of ways, the life of faith has a lot in common with ear training.  Jesus once said that some “people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears.”  (Matthew 13:15, NRSV) It was his way of describing a certain kind of hardness of heart in which people ignored the people around them who were in need.  Contrariwise, he also commended others who had been trained to see with compassion by saying, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.”

Here’s the deal: we can train ourselves to see and hear the injustices around us or we can train ourselves to ignore them.  The saddest thing is not that we notice injustice and choose to ignore it (although that would be sad)  but that our senses have become  dulled to its presence.

Okay, I’ll admit that New Year’s Day has always been one of my least favorite holidays.  It generally involves drinking and crowds, two things about which I am not an enthusiast.  I have often spent New Year’s Eve at home with family celebrating in the least exciting way possible – often sleeping through the changing of the year from one to another.  In many ways, New Year’s is a contrived holiday, since the only reason one year changes to the next at that moment is because we say so.  The calender, while it is informed by our earth’s journey around the sun, is in many ways a figment of our imagination.

I do think, however, that the New Year’s celebration, in the way we understand it, is a pregnant moment.  It can be a time to reflect on the previous year and give thanks.  It can be a time to take inventory of the things for which we are grateful and to whisper our gratitude to the divine origin of our bounty.  In a world where time often whisks by without any significant reflection it is an opportunity to live into the eternal now by reflecting on where we have been and where we are heading.

Like many people, I have also had years to which I was more than happy to say goodbye.  These are the years that mark serious losses or setbacks.  While not wanting to wish away time it is nice to mark the finality of a season of despair and commit ourselves to a new season of hope and expectation.  Without the marking of the years there are no benchmarks for our expectations and we could drift endlessly through periods of grief without a passage into a new era.

The Bible talks about time in two ways.  Chronos is the passage of time in the common sense of the word.  Kairos is time in the sense of a moment of opportunity (often divine intervention).  It is the word that is used to say it is time to act.  Recognizing the changing of one year to another in the passage of time (chronos) calls us to recognize this as a moment of opportunity (kairos) to open ourselves to transformation and growth.

And so, while New Year’s Day may be one of the most secular of holidays for many people, it is also an opportunity to reflect and recommit.  There are many jokes made about the commitments that are made on New Year’s that drop by the wayside soon after.  But I also know of many people who have used this time of the year for serious evaluation of their values and commitments and who have made substantial alterations in their approach to life and loves.  Maybe this is can be an opportunity to live into the divine promise which states, “See, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)

It is our last full day in Guatemala and we will be spending it primarily resting from the week and taking in some sights. Today is different than all our other days in that we will not be having breakfast at the River House but will be traveling by boat from Panajachel to have brunch at a hotel called La Casa del Mundo. Part of what makes La Casa del Mundo unique is that it is only reachable by boat or hiking trail. The hotel is literally built into the side of a steep hill overlooking Lake Atitlán. The food was excellent and it afforded an absolutely stunning view of the lake. After brunch we had some time to hang out. I immediately found a comfortable chair and enjoyed the view while reading a book – for me the definition of heaven! (The picture at the top of this post was my view for the morning.)

After brunch some of our group went back to Panajachel to go zip lining. About half of the combined group (St. Mark’s UMC & John’s Creek UMC) went to San Juan La Laguna for a demonstration of local dyeing and weaving techniques and some shopping. The small shop we visited was off the main street and was run by a co-op of women who joined together to sell their wares. The demonstration was interesting and we had an opportunity to buy some of their products after the demonstration.

I did have one item that I wanted to buy while we were in San Juan. It was a painting of the Last Supper. There were a couple of things that made the painting distinctive. One was that the painting was painted as if looking from above, a technique that is found in many of the local paintings, especially marketplace scenes. Secondly, each of the disciples are depicted wearing the characteristic dress from one of the twelve villages around Lake Atitlán. The villages are named after the twelve apostles, so the dress from the village named after a particular disciple is worn by the disciple in the painting. I am including a photo of the painting so you can see what I mean. There is a copy of the painting in the dining room at the River House and I was drawn to it immediately when I first saw it. Tom Heaton, the director of Mission Guatemala, had told me that it was available in a certain shop in San Juan and I was delighted to successfully purchase a copy!

Tonight we will have our final dinner at River House. We will rise early in the morning and head to Guatemala City to catch our flight back to Atlanta and then Indianapolis.

Today was our last day on the worksite at Las Canoas Baja working on the playground. We made a significant amount of progress on the playground equipment. We also spent more time than usual playing with the children in the schoolyard – kicking balls, taking pictures, practicing our meager Spanish vocabulary, and delightedly listening to our small children companions as they tried out some new found English phrases. Shakespeare penned the line that “parting is such sweet sorrow” and we discovered the existential reality of that phrase today. I have been on many mission trips but I have never experienced the depth of farewell that we experienced with our local co-workers today. It was truly inspiring.

Rather than recount the day in this particular post I want to share a personal serendipity. Because there were two work teams at Mission Guatemala this week our main construction person, Elias, spent time at both sites making sure the work was being done properly. This meant that he left us today at midday to go to the other site where a team from John’s Creek UMC (outside of Atlanta, Georgia) was working. Elias said his farewell to our group through our local translator for the week, a wonderful young man named Diego. Through Diego’s voice in translating, he thanked us for our hard work and for being such a fun group to work with. And then I heard Diego say, “And may your future generations be blessed.”

These words really touched me for a couple of reasons. The first reason was that almost all of the work that we did this week was an effort to bless the future generations in the communities that we worked. Both of our projects were at schools and our hope is the children that are fed at the kitchen we worked on and the children who play on the playground we began constructing will indeed be blessed. In that moment of his blessing I hoped that we had been a blessing through our work and through our playing with Guatemala’s future leaders this week. It seemed as if I could almost hear the voice of God saying, “As you did it to the least of these, my children . . .”

His words also touched me at a very personal level. Being a parent who has watched two of his children die I know what a risky business parenting can be and I am grateful for any blessing on my progeny at any opportunity. I often worry about outliving all of my children, a worry that I have experienced as not uncommon among bereaved parents. My Guatemalan co-worker had no way to know the story of my life or the losses that I have experienced. As a matter of fact, his blessing was not even directed at me personally, but to our group as a whole. Nonetheless, I felt blessed.

When you lose a child there is an emptiness that is persistent and indescribable. There are, however, moments that call you back to life and hope and today I experienced one of those moments from the words of blessing in a language I couldn’t understand, translated by a friend I had met only a few days earlier.

When I remember this trip I will remember many things. I will remember the warm fellowship of our team. I will remember the kinship we have felt with our companion team from Georgia. I will remember the passion and competence of the leaders and staff of Mission Guatemala.

But I suspect my future remembering of this week will be defined by the reality that while my intention was to be a blessing to our neighbors in Guatemala I instead found myself the recipient of an indescribable moment of blessing – not just as a team member but as a father.

If Tuesday of this week was described by the word “concrete” then Wednesday could well be describe by the word “holes.”

After finishing the floor at the kitchen at Nueva Victoria we moved on to begin work on a playground at the school in Las Canoas Baja. This school has over 325 elementary students with fifteen teachers. When we arrived at the school they called a student assembly outside in the cement plaza. The principal introduced all the students and had each of us introduce ourselves. This has been the pattern everywhere we have been this week. There have been formal introductions and welcome rituals. It is heart warming to be welcomed with such joy and enthusiasm!

We spent most of Wednesday afternoon digging post holes in preparation for the construction of a wooden playground structure – slide, swings and jungle gym. As per usual, by the end of the day we were tired and dirty but we did get a lot of holes dug.

I spent most of the morning in a truck with Dave Burns who, along with Tom Heaton, is one of the primary forces behind Mission Guatemala. We spent the morning getting a small cement mixer to the our companion work site (yes, they got a small electric mixer making us a little jealous) and picking up a truck full of lumber to be used for the playground equipment. After we arrived back at Las Canoas Baja our team unloaded the lumber and moved it to a second story room at the school where it would be stored until we needed it.

On Wednesday night we had an evening shopping in Panajachel and then a nice dinner at a restaurant where we enjoyed great food but also some wonderful cultural entertainment. The entertainment was provided by the owner of the restaurant and his family. His three daughters played marimbas with renditions of traditional Guatemalan tunes. We had a hands on course in tortilla making which included a tortilla making contest. Then the owner shared some history of Guatemala along with some stories about faith and traditions in Guatemalan culture. It was an entertaining and satisfying evening.

On Thursday morning we began with a little adventure by walking across a suspension footbridge that crosses a beautiful ravine. It was absolutely gorgeous.

In the morning we finished digging holes and then began constructing our first section of playground equipment. It was in the construction of this equipment that we encountered a developing world problem. Although we had a nice power drill at some point someone had lost the chuck key which allows you to tighten the drill bit. In America replacing this would require a five minute trip to the hardware store for a part that would cost a couple of dollars. However, we weren’t near a hardware store and even if we were it is not likely that their meager inventory would include what we needed. So a job that could have taken a lot less time and had a lot less frustration was stifled because of the lack of a chuck key.

We were able to set the first section of the playground which involved mixing more concrete. It was gratifying to see some visible progress and we look forward to tomorrow’s work. We have a constant parade of onlookers from the children at the school and several of our younger team members have enjoyed playing schoolyard games with them. A particular favorite is “The Hokey Pokey” which one of our team knew in Spanish. It is a joy to watch!

There are many details I am sure that I am omitting but suffice it to say that we continue to find God’s presence manifest wherever we go and have found the people of Guatemala to be warm and welcoming.