philippines: day 1, saturday, april 8

[This first entry is a little weird in that I didn't actually journal it. I didn't have a journal yet at the time, so I scribbled down some thoughts and now I'm trying to use those to create what should have been my journal entry.]

The flight over wasn't too bad, and certainly wasn't anything close to as bad as I expected. I did have the standard screaming kid within five seats - he was one row back and I think three seats toward the center so technically that counts as four - on the long leg of the trip, but he stayed more or less quiet until the last bit of the trip so that wasn't bad at all. I did sleep some but spent a lot of time meeting a lot of interesting people. Yeah, that's weird for me, but hopefully it will continue after I arrive. For the record, I think the check-in to pick-up time of the trip was around 26 hours.

Customs was a breeze compared to my previous third world entry experience (the utter chaos and inefficiency that is Egyptian customs). The team, in an apparent attempt to embarrass me, sang happy birthday loudly in the loading/pick-up zone at the Manila airport at midnight and managed to get a bit of applause. Their efforts were mildly successful. We went home, crashed, and that was that.

Today [Saturday] was our first real day of ministry. We spent the morning in Ang Bahay Parola (ABP, "The Lighthouse" I think) house 3, a street girls' home of ages 5-13 or so. We learned a lot about the street children's ministry Buboy manages. [Buboy has visited and presented at our church before and we support him through prayer and financial assistance.] The girls were cute and fun, and I (gasp!) enjoyed my time around them, playing games and encouraging them and helping them decorate their pictures and whatnot. But as usual I had tremendous difficulty showing emotion with them and relating to them in general; I'm still not at all convinced I'm called to any kind of children's ministry, though I might have done better in a boys' home. But it's irrefutable proof that God can work wonders through our ineptitude, such as mine with kids. Or maybe I'm not as bad as I thought, given the comments of others.

[I can't remember what we did in the afternoon, and the only note I wrote down about it is that I got very tired and need to get more sleep in the nights to come. Yeah...thanks, self. Perhaps that's why I don't remember. Though I also wrote down some stuff about an annoying barking dog that wouldn't shut up during the night, and that Sherri stayed up all night and hasn't slept since the plane landed last night. Wow.]

Walt's "window of interpretation" teaching this morning was great. It seems that the guy has a gift for putting things in terms that connect with me; his past couple of sermons have been awesome as well. But, he followed that with a list of Jonah teachings that need to be covered by everyone in the group as our daily devotionals. I volunteered to lead the first one on Monday, as that will get it out of the way and allow me to focus on the other stuff for the rest of the trip, like my short Bible study and journaling. Plus, the beginning will hopefully be more leader-friendly because I'll be able to take up a chunk of time with a book intro. So Jonah 1:1-6 it is. Looking forward to the rest of the trip!