The Roots and the Foundation

So this week  has been really good for growth. Our classes were about service and pride, which I felt like I was fairly strong in both of those areas seeing as I love to serve, and I have a lot of pride, and then they taught me that pride is not a good thing so now my life is flipped upside down. But honestly I felt like I was handling my pride pretty well until I talked to one of my disciplers, Gabby, on Tuesday night about an issue that I had had with another student. After talking it over he told me how I need to pray about no keeping things to myself and when I have issues with some one I need to find a constructive way to talk it over with them, but if I keep it inside I'll end up being extremely critical of the person. So I took his advice and that night as I was going to sleep I prayed for God to test me in this area of pride. His response was immediate.

So the next morning we all knew that we were going to the work site all day to help build the base and pour the foundation for the directors house. Originally we had planned on everyone waking up at 6:30 instead of 7:00 so that we'd be ready on time, but the leaders decided to just have everyone wake up at 7:00 instead, and they told everyone, or so we thought. But at 6:30 in the morning one of the leaders Dawelky woke us up at 6:30, so I told him what the other leaders had said, but he was sure that I was wrong because no one had told him, so after that he went to the kitchen to finish making breakfast. So my friend David asked if we were really supposed to get up or not and I responded "No, he's wrong, he always gets confused, just go back to sleep." Within a few minutes I started realizing that that might be a little prideful, so I decided to get up and go talk to him again in the kitchen. So after I re-explained myself he still thought I was wrong, so I said "fine" and I went back in the room and got everyone else up.

Now at 7:00 David and I went to the kitchen to get breakfast and when we did Dawelky apologized and explained to us that we had been right but when the leaders decided to change the time he had been in town and they forgot to inform him. So we accepted his apology and at the end of the ay we only really lost twenty minutes of sleep anyway.

So as I prayed about everything God had been doing in that half hour of the morning he started revealing to me that if I had decided to be prideful and not listen to my leader it would have just caused trouble for me and we wouldn't have figured out what the real problem was, but since I had decided to walk in obedience and talk to my leader we found the real source of the issue which was just a lack of communication. And when I thought bout all of this I realized I was ready to rebel against my leader just to get twenty minutes of sleep, so then I began to wonder what have been my other twenty minutes of sleep in life. God dug deep and didn't just show me my pride, but he began to show me the root of it, and I'm extremely thankful.

Aside from this lesson, this week was pretty tough because Lucas, volunteer from Michigan left to go home. So we spent half the we all spent half the week hanging out eating fracturas and joking around, and then on Thursday the base threw him a little going away party. But right before the party Lucas got me and the other two Americans to come outside where he had a box of sweets (including peanut butter), some gifts, and a letter for each of us. So again we sat around eating fracturas, and telling jokes, but then we reminisced about the three months here. At the end of the night Lucas gave me his Spanish/English bible to help me learn more Spanish, and I was blown away.

It was crazy how close we had all gotten in just three months, especially since Lucas wasn't even in the classes with us, but it became clear to me that it wasn't about how much time we'd all had together, but what was more important was the quality of time. We ate together, prayed together, talked about God, our families, our homes, and we even had a thirty minute conversation about how chic-fil-a  is the greatest fast food restaurant in America. I'm realizing that I'm going to end up missing all of these guys a lot, especially in a week when we split up and go on outreach. It's kind of hard because we've all left our own families, but we've found that we have a much bigger family, and when I'm done here I'' be able to say I have family all over the world. It's kind of insane.

So this will probably be my last update from Puerta Madryn and I don't know what the internet situation will be like during my outreach. But I'll constantly be praying for everyone at home, I'll especially be praying for fellowship and unity in the body of Christ. God bless.  

                                                                                                -Prov. 27:17
                                                                                                -Matt Hursh

Renewal

As some of you may remember in my last blog I posted about a three day fast that we had about a month ago, well guess what... we had another one! Two people in the base received words from God about another three day fast and it was announced without them even talking to each other. And the focus of this fast was about renewal and faith. For the first few days we focused all on renewal of our minds and on putting off everything that was hindering us from going deeper in our spiritual walk with God, and putting on the things of God (Ephesians 4:22-24), but the last day was all about praying with expectancy. We focused on the scripture in 1 Kings 14:42-44 and we split into seven groups each to pray for a specific thing that we feel God has in store for us in the next year and we prayed seven times throughout the day believing the God is faithful to his people and that he will provide. It was a really good time for deeping my own prayer life and sharing in the community of my brothers and sisters.

In addition to all of that this week has been a lot of fun with us starting to decorate the base for Christmas, celebrating the 17th anniversary of our directors, and I got to be on the student lead worship team on Saturday, which made me realize how much I miss playing my bass. We also had Wednesday off because our base was sponsoring the womens day of faith in Puerta Madryn  in which 80 women attended. It was a day for Prayer, Workshops, and Fellowship, for most, but for David, Miguel, Paul, and Myself, it was a day of digging a giant whole at our new property. My hands are torn up but we had a lot of fun and we were able to dig a hole for the bathrooms of the future staff houses about 1 meter deep and 2 meters wide.

Aside from all the work and all the fasting all of us students have been preparing for our outreach and I'm getting extremely excited. Preaching the Gospel all day everyday sounds extremely good to me. We'll be leaving the day after Christmas and returning at the end of February. So, I just can't wait.

                                                                               Hebrews 11:1
                                                                                -Matt Hursh 

Three days fast

So it's been about three weeks since I've last posted but they've been pretty good. We had a really intense class called inner healing and the plumb line. This class was all about looking into ourselves and our own personalities and trying to clean out all of the junk and sins that we've been carrying around for years, needless to say it was a lot of work for everyone. To help us in the class the entire base had a three day fast which I was kind of dreading, but after we started  God did a ton of work in my life, and destroyed a lot of barriers that I had and at the end of the three days he spoke clearly to me and confirmed the work that he has for me.

On top of all of that stuff we've been gearing up for our outreach. We've been divided into two teams: Team Peru, and Team Argentina. I'm on Team Argentina with Moises and Genesis from Ecuador, Philip and Selina from Ghana, Lillian from Brazil, and Carol and Gabby from Argentina. I will be the only American and the only person with English as a first language so it will be a lot of time fore spiritual and linguistic growth. We'll be doing a lot of work in northern Argentina with a lot of different churches and cities and for two weeks we'll come back to Puerta Madryn to help with Movida Madryn, which is an effort to get the youth in this city to think of Christianity outside of the church and start putting their faith into action.I'm really excited for this time.

In the midst of all of this me and the other Americans, Charlie and David, and our Venezuelan friend Pablo, got to the base pretty late one night so our consequence was that we couldn't leave the base on the next weekend which happened to be right after thanksgiving. So we decided the only thing we could do was to have a Thanksgiving dinner at the base while everyone else was in town. And I must say Pablo didn't know much about thanksgiving before but he loves it now. We were able to have 2 kilos of fried potatoes, bread with dolce con leche, a cake, and a big chicken leg for each of us with juice for about $10 US dollars all together. A lot of food, not a lot of money, and a lot of fellowship spent cooking, eating and, cleaning together, I think we turned our consequence into a pretty good day.

I'm looking forward to the outreach, but I'm also looking forward to coming home afterward and doing more work with the churches in Norwood. I would love to see the city be on fire with the Holy Spirit, and I feel like God is giving me a lot of ideas, but as our volunteer from Michigan, Lucas says "We have to stop talking about what we're going to do and start doing it." I think I'm ready to take that challenge. 

                                                                            Ephesians 4:22-24
                                                                              -Matt Hursh