Early morning on June 13, I departed Atlanta with a dozen or so team members to San Diego, where we then drove across the border into Tijuana, Mexico. I'd been planning on this trip since my freshmen year of high school about five years ago (yikes, has it really been that long?!) and I cannot thank God enough for allowing me to go on this trip with some strong Christian role models. Also, to all of my supporters that helped make this trip happen with your financial help, and more importantly your much needed prayers, thank you immensely because it was an experience that helped draw me nearer to Christ but also helped open my eyes to many political and controversial topics it seems our country has completely tried to shift our beliefs from. Every opportunity it seemed that someone could pray for me and my fellow team members was taken upon as a task of an individual, a church, and a community of Christ worshippers whether home in Atlanta or across the nation into the different beautiful city of Tijuana, Mexico.
I will be posting in the next upcoming days individual blog posts of each day we spent serving the Tijuana community and how your prayers and financial offerings helped the community. Thank you to everyone who allowed me to go across the nation and share my love for love itself. It was more than a blessing for me.
Also, my Spanish honestly wasn't too bad (jokes, it was really bad). I kind of mixed up hermosa, meaning beautiful or handsome, and hermana, a sister, like a lot (the whole trip actually.) It wasn't until the end that I realized why I was getting some weird side glances from the children when one of my teammates corrected me. Next trip, I will have better Spanish and I will master my atrocious and unacceptable language inadequacy.
However, it is crazy how well you can communicate without knowing each other's language. We still had fun laughing and joking around as we fellowshipped and loved on one another. The one major thing I learned, and hope everyone else in the world is able to understand, was that our love, kindness, and happiness truly wasn't shown through words or the things we brought to Tijuana with us, but through our actions and our genuine time spent with each other and their community.
Thank you to everyone who has been thinking and praying for me, our Atlanta team, and the Spectrum Ministries staff,
Emma xoxo