Greetings from the Philippines!

Maayong buntag! (Good morning)

I'm in Cebu City right now awaiting my boat to Camotes this afternoon. We're in this huge mall at an internet cafe. It's almost time for the kids to start back to school here, so there are little kids all over the place. Yesterday was our last day of orientation and we spent the better part of the day on a ropes course (obstacle course with bungee cords and harnesses and such). So that mainly meant rolling in the mud for me due to my abundance of grace. We're all SUPER tired, but we've had a great time and learned a lot. Part of my team's assignment is to teach True Love Waits seminars for high school juniors and seniors (15 and 16-year-olds here), so we've been in training for that for a few days and it's been a really neat experience. I think teaching about God's plan for us when it comes to love and talking about what true love is will be really eye-opening and surprising, like everything else here. My team members are Bobby (from Kentucky), Matt (from Mississippi), Kaylee (from Florida), Carly (from Alabama) and Lauryn (from Mississippi). Our Filipino counterparts are Sally and Jetter. They've been struggling to teach me some Cebuano words, but I'm getting the hang of it.

Quick story: there were floods in Davao City (where we did orientation) our first two nights. Nearly everything I brought got wet and a good bit of it is still wet. We woke up in our tent with streams of water flowing under us and everything! It was really ridiculous. That part of the Philippines is very mountainous and there are rocks everywhere. Before the rain, when we were walking around the camp, it was easier for us to avoid the hard rocks and walk on the dirt. But after the floods, you had to stay on the rocks or you'd be sitting in the mud. I found a spiritual equivalent, I believe: My baptism (as represented by the flood), or my salvation, causes everything in my life to change. After the flood, I had to hang everything out to dry, keep all my things in a different place, and other things that wouldn't normally concern me did once it rained. I had to seek out the hard things (the rocks) to stand on. They were the only things that offered any stability. When our salvation is true, when it is like something that floods through us, it absolutely must change everything about the way we live. It turns everything upside down. The things that were to be avoided before are now the things we seek out and the places that were easiest to walk in before are now the quickest ways to failure.

I hope this finds you well and that you're seeking to do the hard things God calls us to. They truly make a difference!

God bless,
Leah

P.S. There will be a blog about our team run by one of the media team members if I'm not mistaken. I don't really know anything about it, but you can probably find more information on the Nehemiah Teams website.