Feeling all the Feelings.

Where to start?
I went from trying to blog twice a week to not blogging at all for a couple weeks.

I haven't really know how to put into words how I've been feeling the last few weeks so I just didn't. That's one thing I am really learning while being here, how to express myself. I've always just kept feelings and what I'm thinking mostly to myself, but here I am sort of forced to express myself more.

We've hit the halfway mark of our time here in Ecuador, which seems absolutely insane to me. It went by so fast which makes me think the 2nd half will go by even faster. I feel like this is the time where the rubber meets the road. At this point life here in Ecuador now seems pretty normal. I'm not just here visiting, this is where I am living life right now. This is where it can be really easy to start to get lazy about everything we do here because it isn't so new and exciting anymore, its just what we do now. My type of personality has to really fight against this, when things aren't as exciting to me anymore I tend to naturally put less effort into them and start looking towards whatever my next "new and exciting" thing will be. Although I am starting to plan for when I get home and what my next steps will be after I finish this program I don't want that to take away from the here and now.

We start spring break on Friday and I think its the perfect time to step back and have a time of refreshing so we can all come back and finish strong. Honestly it's a little scary to start thinking about what to do when I go home. I feel like because of all that I have learned and have yet to learn it has given me a responsibility to do something with it. It's a bit overwhelming and exciting all at once. So that's where I'm at right now, kind of at a crossroads, feeling all the feelings if you know what I mean.

Pixel Campaign.

On Easter Sunday we spent the morning/afternoon in the historical district doing our pixel campaign.

We partner with the catholic church there and they let us use the side of their building which is an alley way that a lot of people walk through. We stopped people and asked them if they would like to participate in our art campaign. 

We had little black sheets of paper and we asked people if they would like to write down something they would like to be forgiven for or something that they want to forgive someone else for. We explained we would stick the papers up on the wall which would eventually turn into the face of Jesus.

It was really neat to see the different reactions we received from people. Some people wanted to just stop and watch what was happening and when we asked them if they wanted to participate ended up walking away and wanted nothing to do with it. While other people opened up to members of our team and shared some very heavy stuff with them. We had the opportunity to pray for many people that day too. 

I love all the different campaigns we have the opportunity to do while we are here.You never talk to the same people at the campaigns so even if we do the same campaign a couple times its always a different experience. This weekend we will be doing a campaign called 'Let Go' which is one I have never done before so I am very excited about it and cant wait to share :)

Life and Death Campaign.

I almost forgot about posting a blog today! We did two campaigns this weekend so we kept pretty busy over here. On Friday I had the opportunity to be a piece of living art in our Life and Death Campaign.

Since it was good Friday we thought it was the perfect timing to do a little bit of a darker campaign. We caught people's attention with our art display and then asked them to grab a flower petal and write what they believed would happened to them after they died. It seems a bit of a heavy topic to talk with strangers about but the fact is that one day we will all die, no matter what your beliefs are everyone can agree on that one thing. We just challenged people to really examine why they believe what they believe about the afterlife.

No matter what you think happens (or doesn’t happen) when you die, when you pause to reflect on this truth there are always a few things that come to mind:

Death can motivate us to live.

Life here on earth is short, or as the bible so aptly puts it in James 4:14, “For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanishes away.” When we reflect on the fact that one day we will die we can find purpose in the way that we live each day.

Death makes us question what we believe.

When we ponder the mystery of death we grapple with the stark reality that we could be wrong about what we think happens when we die.  It’s easy to say pat answers like, “I don’t believe in anything.” Oddly enough, even that statement in itself is a belief. All of us have beliefs and those beliefs will one day lead us somewhere...the question is where?

So those are the topics we spoke to people about during the entirety of the campaign. I myself did not get to have conversations with anyone because as you can see I was an actual piece of the campaign. I stood still just like in the pictures above for 2 hours while the rest of my team held conversations with people who stopped to take notice of what it is we were doing. From where I stood though I could still hear lots of conversations going on, there was a crowd gathered the entire 2 hours we stood there. It was really neat to just sort of be a fly on the wall and watch the whole campaign unfold. This was a brand new campaign and our first time doing it and overall I would say it was a success. You never know how people are going to react to things when they have never been done.

On Sunday we did our 'Pixel Campaign' which I am editing photos from tonight so I will post about that one later this week!