We've arrived!! We are safe and sound in beautiful Playa Del Carmen, MEXICO! We are sleeping on the floor of the church and have everything set-up and ready to get going for our first day of ministry tomorrow! Thank you for all of your prayers leading up to our trip. Please keep praying as we prepare for tomorrow. We will be painting at the church with Pastor Jose and some other members of the church and we get to go to a school and share the love of Christ with all of the kids there! We can't wait to tell you about it tomorrow! Please leave us lots of encouragement! See you in a week Minnesota!

Today we all woke up in Mexico! We enjoyed seeing palm trees and hearing roosters while we ate breakfast in the church courtyard. Our service projects today were at this church. We painted two of the Sunday School classrooms a bright green color. There are large stadium steps on the roof of the sanctuary, which we cleaned and scraped today. We also began painting that part of the roof. It was quite a feeling of accomplishment to do some service work and finish some things today.

This afternoon, we visited a local high school. We walked a few blocks from the church to the school, and then met hundreds of kids. We played soccer, volleyball, and basketball with them for a while. Then as everyone felt more comfortable together, we began to communicate. It was great to step out of our comfort zones and have conversations about Jesus, families, and fun. Many of us felt that God was working through us, allowing us to converse without saying many words.

We can't wait to see what God has in store for us during the rest of this week.

Scraping on the roof of the church.

Molly talks about cheese balls with the kids at the school.

The past two days have been awesome! We got to go to a park and play with kids, to a Mayan village 3 hours away, work on our projects and lead a church service! God is at work in our lives and the people in Mexico and it is wonderful! We got so close to being done with all of our work projects, but we had a change of plans when the rain decided to make it's debut yesterday. Painting a roof is not the smartest idea when its raining. However, we got to go to the Mayan village, and despite the rain, everyone's spirits were high! We met a lot of new people at a church in the village. They were so hospitable! It was amazing to see how a church that didn't even have a roof over the building were generous enough to make us dinner, bring us water, and walk us around the village. We went to a park in the village and spoke with some kids there in the pouring rain! It was such a cool experience! We thank you for all of your prayers! We leave for home tomorrow, but our mission trip has only just begun!

During the Service we did our cardboard testimonies in Spanish. A powerful message of Christ's redeeming love.