“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
~ Hebrews 11:1

What do stale cheetos have to do with hope, you ask? Well, I’m glad to have piqued your curiosity!

It was the spring of this year, when God really started putting on my heart that I needed to do something with the girls from our church. But honestly this story starts seven years ago when we first moved here.

Since you’ve been on my blog here, you might have seen a page called “Ministry Partners”. It still needs to be updated for this year, but is current as of last year, and includes the various people and organizations we’ve worked with over the past fifteen years of short-term missions trips and living here. By the time we moved here, we had worked with three different churches in town, so when it came time to looking for a church to attend, we knew we wanted one thing: some place with a lot of kids that were Chloe’s age, so that as she (and our future children) grew, she could make strong friendships. We found that in La Huerta. The first day we attended her Sunday school class alone (2-6 year olds) had fifteen children, and there were two other good-sized age groups as well!

As the years have passed the kids have changed. They’ve all grown, some have moved away, while others just stopped attending after a while. But on average her class numbers have stayed easily in the six to ten range, going as high as twelve kids attending just in her class, on a really good day. But she still didn’t really know them.

Now that you have all of this context…

The Lord put on my heart, in the spring, that I should start something for the girls at our church. I ruminated in this for a while, praying about it and talking to Adam about what it might look like. I wanted it to be discipleship, but not like sitting in church, and I wanted it to be a fun time where the girls could get to know one another better, while they also got to know Jesus.

Adam suggested that I also involve Sabine (sab-EE-nay, or Sabi) a fellow Sunday school teacher and young mom at La Huerta. I talked to her about it in the kitchen during the plenarias (see September post), and she was so excited to get involved! Sabi participated in something in something similar as a kid in the church that she grew up in.

We figured out a day, October 10th, set a time, made a plan, sent out invitations….

…and God had other plans. Sabi’s uncle passed away on the 8th and she left town for a few days to be with family and attend the funeral. We had already made the plans and sent the invitations, so I continued on as planned. I was so sad that Sabi couldn’t be there, then I hit a brain block as to what we should study during the devotional time, and finally, I couldn’t find the brand of cheetos that I wanted to serve the girls. But Jesus came through. Just like He always does! He gave me the topic of friends: What makes a good friend, and how can I be friends with Him? We would sing “I Have Found a Friend in Jesus” and I did eventually buy a different brand of cheetos than what I was looking for.

By Friday afternoon, I had a different problem. It was looking like no one was going to come. I had called to remind people and find out if anyone needed us to pick them up, but only one girl, Sarita, answered. The girl that Sabi was going to bring was out of town, one of the girls had chicken pox, we went to the house of another girl and no one answered the door, I didn’t have the phone number of still another, and our neighbor girl wasn’t home to invite either. I had faith that the people that were supposed to be there would be, but I was starting to get discouraged. A little while later, Sarita’s mom called me and asked if we could pick Sarita up, so with hopeful hearts, we left to get her.

We made small talk in the car, she’s a typical thirteen year old. Her favorite color is lilac, she collects key chains, likes to play games, and is enjoying her first year of Secundaria (equivalent to seventh grade in the US), she is also the closest friend that Chloe has at church. When we got to the house, we offered her something to drink, and waited a few minutes to see if anyone else would come. No one else did, but that was OK. Everything had to be adjusted down for a smaller group, but we figured it out. After our devotional time, we opened those cheetos. My kiddos had been asking for them for two days by this point and they were excited. But it became pretty obvious that the cheetos were really stale.

We moved on from our snack to make stress balls out of balloons and flour. It was a super simple and fun craft! The kids really enjoyed drawing funny faces on their balloon balls after they filled them with flour. Sarita had opted to do a shorter craft so that we could play a board game since there were only four of us (Sarita, Chloe, Aubri, and Evelynn, I translated the game into Spanish, and Tobias sat in his highchair and ate stale cheetos). Sarita chose to play “Sorry!” which ended up being a really fun time and she won!

After Sarita left, I just couldn’t help but smile. Did everything go smoothly? Not even close. Did two of the flour-filled stress balls explode all over our kitchen table before we even finished the game? Yes, that happened. But I have so much hope! Hope that more girls will come in November and God will grow this for His glory. Hope that Sabi will be able to participate in the future and we can cultivate our friendship through this ministry. I know that Jesus can can use exploding stress balls and stale cheetos for His glory, and that gives me hope that He can use me!