Mission to Mexico 2006

Click on photo for slide show

I just returned from a mission trip with members of my congregation. The trip took us from Honolulu to Los Angeles to San Diego to Tijuana and, lastly, to a campground midway between Tijuana and Tecate where the 19 of us camped for five nights.

In the eastern edge of Los Floridas (east of Tijuana, we built a small, two-room house for a family of five. We worked under the guidance of the wonderful Christian border ministry called Amor.

If you would like to see a short, captioned slide show of the trip you can click on the picture above and enjoy the wonderful adventures of "Renn," a small, plastic dog that went along with us.

It took four days to build the house. No power tools were used. All lumber was local (Mexican) and of a quality that cannot be found at Home Depot! Even the cement for the foundation was hand mixed and hand "poured" shovel by shovel by shovel!

We also enjoyed leading a small neighborhood "Vacation Bible School" for the local children each afternoon and some of us even played a little "pick-up" soccer with them. There are, after all, many ways of sharing the good news of God's saving love in Jesus Christ!

As always those of us who went were blessed by "loving our neighbor" in obedience to our Lord, Jesus Christ. We enjoyed meeting and interacting with the Mexican people and in eating the local food. The sun was often hot. The strong afternoon winds blew sand and dust every afternoon (filling our tents each day) and there were strained muscles, hammered fingers, splinters and a whole lot of sweat poured out in love.

We pray that our efforts not only benefitted our Mexican family but their neighborhood and local community as well.

As a bonus, we visited the house we built two years ago and found the neighborhood and community growing with more employment, improved infrastructure, new businesses and even a nearly-completed multi-screen cinema complex!

May God bless the good people of Mexico.