How did I get here #2

This my friends, is a Bolivian sunrise. God made it just for me...and the thousands of other people who saw it. But just for me.

I said I was going to do more How did I get here's...and Oops....i forgot. My life has kinda gotten crazy lately. Have I mentioned I'm @ TFA institute?

Anyways...I just thought my blog is boring these days, no pictures you know. That led to me finding this picture, and remembering my How Did I Get Here's. So...this one is gonna be short and sweet. And I apologize in advanced that a lot of these will be related to Bolivia and Africa...but that's my heart...I'll find other ones.

I had a moment when I was watching this sunrise.

Three of us had taken a few days off at the internado in Bolivia and hoped a bus to the first "big" town, rurrenebaque. I'm using the word big VERY LOOSELY. Think the smallest town you know...then divide by 10. Rurre is probably still smaller. Anyways...We decide to do an overnight tour in the pampas, which are basically swampy jungle. The tour consisted of floating down the river. Seeing capabaras (the world's largest rodent...think about what a rat would have looked like in the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids and you'll have an idea what that is), pink freshwater dolphins, monkeys of all kinds, birds of all kinds, and more alligators and cayman than I ever care to see again.

In the afternoon we went swimming with the dolphins. Which also means we went swimming with the cayman and alligators as well. (obviously we lived to tell the tale).

That night we met up with other tourists to watch the sunset and play soccer...and in that conversation we met a girl from Holland. Her name was Claire. The story is simply this. Claire asked what brought the three of us to Bolivia. We explained that it was mission work, yadda yadda ya...

Then Claire said she "wasn't a Christian and she didn't really get what that was all about anyways. If there is a God, he should just care that people are nice, not whether or not they put their faith and trust in Jesus"my paraphrase . Long story short...We got it all wrong. We gave her the wrong answer. We flat out told her lies (I'll take the brunt of that one). We were ill prepared to share our faith, and we did nothing to help Claire's along. In an effort to keep her from thinking Christians were pushy or judgemental, we failed, and we all walked away from that conversation knowing we had failed.

The next morning, seeing this sunset, I was reminded that "His compassion never fails, His mercies are new every morning" -Lamentations 3:22-23

And I wondered ...
"How did I get here?"
In a strange country,
With three people I barely new before I left the states
In the middle of the jungle
Talking with a girl from Holland
Who was fluent in 3 languages and learning a fourth
Was way smarter than me
and was asking me about Jesus
AND THEN...
Even after I failed and knew it...
The Lord painted that beautiful picture for me.
To remind me that he knows my faults already,
and has compassion on them
because my words couldn't have saved Claire anyway
Only my God can
and my God will send me another Claire
and He'll send Claire another christian.