Laughing myself through the day!

Hey guys, this is Matt again!

Can I just take a moment and say how incredible God is? He has astounded me countless times these past few days with His faithfulness, and I am so confident He will continue to be everything I will need to make it through these next seven weeks. Not just "make it through", but thrive and "have life abundantly" in His grace.

As Morgan said, I will be living wayyyy at the bottom of a rather frighteningly steep hill with four other maintenance workers who I haven't met yet...though I already feel rather terrible for them: having me do maintenance all day every day seems like an incredible risk!! Maybe Casa Bernabe just wants to make sure there will be plenty of repair jobs for the summer teams, I dunno.

My room is humble and humbling. It is humble due to it's thin walls, leaky roof, lack of a functioning shower as far as I can tell (right now it is bike storage), strange, possibly spider-infested holes in the wall, and meager bedding. It is humbling because as of right now I haven't figured out how to get into it and have spent around 30 minutes standing in front of it looking helpless until someone helped me with a magical key maneuver I failed to replicate 25 minutes later. It is also humbling because it is truly all I could ask for, and I am thrilled to be living there. I asked God to stretch me this summer, and if He is willing to challenge me by simply allowing me to live as my roommates do all year round then I most certainly cannot complain. On the contrary, I am full of joy and laughter at the goodness of my "situation" and the beauty of God's providence. Again, I asked God to draw me nearer to Him and He has provided everything I could want this summer to search after Him with passion. I am sure that it will soon become home.

Casa Bernabe is a beautiful place in every way. It won't be easy here, and having to say goodbye to two of our team members will be so difficult...but we are here for the orphanage and we will try our best to serve them with smiles and joy and all of that great stuff.

Ok, we're about to have our team meeting to see who gets voted off the orphanage (not really...). Love you guys, talk to you later.

-Mateo