So ends another adventure. Monday morning, I got in a bus with some of the others who were heading north, crossed the border, got dropped off at the San Diego airport, spent about three hours doing Hebrew (as I’d been sadly deprived for the previous week and was starting to go through withdrawal), got on my plane without incident, and without any further notable happenings, met my parents at the PDX airport and came home.

My last week/week and a half in Mexico was very stretching. However, despite this (or rather, because of it), it was an amazing week.

Challenge number 1: stomach troubles. For about a week after arriving in Ensenada, my stomach decided that it didn’t like me and was in a state of violent rebellion. All I have to say is that, if any of my ancestors participated in the Spanish Conquista, Montezuma has been avenged.

Challenge number 2: Mexican health care. Sometime early Saturday morning, I was awake for some reason and trying to get comfortable on my bed, when I somehow managed to dislocate my shoulder. I started squealing like a little girl and awakened my poor room-mate, who was somewhat baffled as to how I’d managed to accomplish this feat. He in turn awakened Iván and Eddy (who had some first aid experience), who rigged a makeshift sling for me. Getting off of the bunk bed (which was six feet off the ground and without a workable ladder) was a bit of a challenge, but Mexican creativity found a way. Then Iván carefully drove me along the bumpy streets to the Red Cross hospital, where the doctor reset the bone. He equipped me with a rag-sling that made my boy scout training look almost professional, and said I was good to go; just take some medication if I had any recurrent discomfort. I asked if (because the roads were bumpy), they might possibly wrap some tape around the arm as well to further stabilize it; the nurse rolled her eyes and made some comment about gringos, but complied. Two hours and 80 pesos later, as good as new.

It’s funny to see the contrast between the American and Mexican approach to health care. When I first dislocated this shoulder while attempting to learn to snow board in Colorado 6 years ago, I lay in the snow without moving until the first aid team showed up. They immobilized me, put me in a stretcher, skied me down to the first aid station, brought in several doctors and nurses to check, put the arm back in place, made a prescription for pain meds, gave Physical Therapy exercises I should do, outfitted me with a sling that looked like it came out of Star Trek, and recommended that I follow up in a week or two. Total damage: about 800 dollars. Now, strange as it may seem, I think I actually prefer the Mexican approach. Was the care that I received in the states better than that in Mexico? Unquestionably. Was it 800 times better? Unquestionably not. In the states, the slightest ailment is call for a specialist (and office bills that would have shamed NASA 60 years ago). In Mexico the approach is, yeah, it happens; deal with it. However, I almost prefer that; it’s more empowering to operate in a system that assumes you can cope with the bumps that life sends your way.

Challenge number 3: Housekeeping. Upon arrival, I was supposed to get a key to my room. I checked in with Egla, the young woman who is in charge of housekeeping. She promised me that she would get it for me the following day. The following day she was not on base. Or the day after. The day after that, I believe that she did come (briefly) but left before I could contact her. I posted on her facebook wall, as that seemed to be the only possible way of getting in touch with her, and she said that she was sorry, she would take care of it. The next day, she said that she would get someone else to take care of it. At this point, I gave up. Moral of the story: two and a half weeks in Mexico locked out of my own room.

Challenge number 4: Scheduling SNAFUs. On Sunday, we were supposed to get our next MA cycle arriving. With a team from England, a large Chinese-American church, a Korean-American church, and a Seattle-based church, this was to be our largest group. However, just how large did not become clear until the groups actually arrived. The night of the British team’s arrival, we were informed in a panicked tone that the beds needed to be prepared and rooms cleaned. (For the record, this also should have been Egla’s responsibility). The next day when the other teams arrived, we discovered that we didn’t have enough beds on base to accommodate them, and we spent two hours panickedly attempting to prepare the rooms that had been quarantined because of a bedbug infestation. As the team from the Korean church arrived, I was still the room trying to mop away the last of the white powder that had been scattered everywhere as a deterrent to the bedbugs. The team walked in, looked at the state of the room, looked at the bunk beds (which swayed like a sailing ship if you tried to get in the top bunk; I tried to sell them as “rock-a-by beds,” but without much success), and were clearly not pleased. All I could do was smile, shrug my shoulders, and say, “Oh, well; that’s Mexico.”

Challenge number 5: Water. Monday, the first day that our teams were there, I went to was breakfast dishes in the morning, turned the faucet, and nothing came out. That’s odd, I thought. I went back to my apartment. The sink gurgled a bit, and then fell back to sleep. It turns out that, because of the scarcity of water in Ensenada, the municipal authorities turned off water to everywhere except the downtown tourist area (because gringos are evidently much more finicky about that sort of thing than the natives). The good news is that, since Mexican tap water is not drinkable anyway, we had a plentiful supply of drinking water. The bad news is that that meant two days or complicated dish-washing schedule and no showers. At one point, we actually had an assembly line set up to draw water from a cistern and haul it up to a barrel three flights up so that the teams could bucket flush their toilets (which, after two days of being unflushable, were a bit unsanitary, even by Mexican standards). It was actually kind of a cool experience; for all the references that the Bible makes to drawing water, it somehow seems more real now that I’ve actually done it.

Challenge number 6: Plans change. We did a passion play for the groups. Unfortunately, Iván (who was playing a guard) got a little too into the role and smashed the big toe of Nick, who was playing Jesus. Nick gave some unfeigned groans of agony, managed to die with relative serenity, and was hauled away to pay yet another visit to the local hospital. After five or so injections in his toe and a new bandage, he was feeling somewhat better, but definitely out of commission for the activities that were planned for the week.

The loss of Nick (and one other interpreter, who had a schedule conflict) meant that the entire plan got reshuffled. I was informed 12 hours before we left that I was going to be with Faith Fellowship, the Seattle team, for their community outreach. The next day, I discovered that, of the 15 people going out, I was the only one who spoke any Spanish, I was the only staff member allowed to drive a van, and we were going to be building a brick wall for the local church. Now, as you are probably aware, I am generally a fairly passive personality, and don’t usually volunteer myself to be in leadership roles; I have no masonry or carpentry experience, and can only guess at what materials we would actually need to complete this process; and am one of the world’s less talented drivers (and an even worse navigator), and the thought of trying to navigate the anarchy of Mexican traffic in a large, less-than-reliable vehicle with ten passengers in the back was not exactly something I relished. Still, oddly enough, I wasn’t all that worried. Oh, well, I figured. God will sort it.

The pastor showed up, made some introductions, and invited us to follow him to the church. I explained that we had some money (about two hundred dollars) to buy supplies, but we didn’t know what we would need; don’t worry, he responded, we can take care of it when we get to the church. So, we followed him to his church: the “Lighthouse Biblical Baptist church” in a small colonia just northeast of Ensenada. (Of necessity, my directional skills improved markedly this past week). When we got to the small church, we found ground covered in gravel; the pastor said that we should make ourselves at home, and he would come back with some more men from the church to help. So, we picked up trash around the streets for about a half hour until his dusty old minivan returned. As the three guys piled out, ready to go, it became clear that there had been some sort of disastrous miscommunication. Over the next (extremely awkward) 15 minutes or so I translated a conversation between Eric (the pastor of Faith Fellowship) and Jose Alfredo (the Mexican pastor). It came out that Iván (who had arranged the meeting) had somehow left the pastor with the impression that we were going to come and run a children’s program; the extent of our role in the construction process was providing funds to buy necessary materials. Further, the pastor was left with the impression that we would be bringing somewhere around $2,500 USD to provide materials for the construction site. On the basis of this “information,” the congregation had come up with a master plan for a complete overhaul of the church, and intended to use the funds to complete the new floor; several of the men of the congregation had taken a few days off work to provide the labor. The $200 which we had actually bought would provide materials for only about four square meters of flooring. Oops.

I’m not entirely sure what happened. As a peso is worth about ten cents US, it seems that Iván described the amount in pesos and the pastor heard the amount in dollars. Where the brick wall came into play, I have no idea. While Mexicans are, in generally, pretty guarded in their words around strangers and careful not to offend, the pastor made a few “joking” references to taking Iván out for a surfing expedition and tying something to his feet. We improvised as best we could; we used the money that we had brought to complete the church bathrooms (it’s amazing how far money goes in Mexico), and hurriedly started improvising a children’s program. Sometime around three in the afternoon, I started shaking my head, letting un-Christian words run through my mind, and thanking God that I was only going to be two weeks with YWAM Ensenada.

Now, if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably shaking your head (as I was in my DTS) and thanking your lucky stars that you never had any close encounters with YWAM, Ensenada, or Mexico in general. The funny thing is, when I look back at the past week, at the whole trip, it was great. Amazing. Wonderful. John Eldridge, in his book, Wild at Heart, mentions a conversation he had with a friend about being stuck on the North Sea during a storm. As the boat was thrown about by the waves and on the point of capsizing, he was almost sure that he was going to do. He ended the story shockingly: “It was the greatest day of my life.” Now, at the time, I thought he was nuts, but now I think I can understand a little better.

We live in a society that promotes ease as the ultimate good. Why go through the trouble of making real friends when facebook is so much easier? Why actually learn your mom’s cell number when you have speed dial? Why go through the hard work of learning math when you have a calculator? The answer: because, at the deepest level, that’s what it means to be human: to rise to the challenge that presents itself. And after we do, we know ourselves a bit better and we can be more confident in our ability to meet the next challenge. Honestly, though many of the circumstances that drove me crazy the first time around—the chaos, disorder, noise, dirt, heat, etc—were just as present this time, I approached it from a completely different angle. I saw last time that God came through, and so this time, I was more easily able to let go and trust that, all appearances to the contrary, He would do so again. And as a result of letting go and trying things that I was not comfortable with, I discovered that I could do things I never thought I could. It turns out that I actually do have a sense of direction, however undeveloped. According to my passengers, I am the best driver at the Ensenada base (which should tell you something about Mexican drivers). I discovered that I have an ability to take initiative and leadership that I never knew existed. Each time I go to Mexico, not despite the challenges, but precisely because of them, I emerge a different person. I entered DTS a confused and discouraged boy looking for a direction, and emerged as a young man with renewed confidence in a God who cares. This time, I came back a man with renewed confidence that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

And though this has already gone on about eight times longer than any reasonable email should, it would not be fair to conclude without at least mentioning the unambiguous blessings of the trip. I reconnected with the vast majority of my DTS, and it was quite surprising to me how much I’d missed them. I made new friends. YWAM may not be a great place to go to get things done in an orderly fashion, but it is a great place to meet people with fascinating stories. Besides members of the base staff, I also connected with my friend Libby’s parents (whose dad and mine would be kindred spirits), and was especially blessed to be working with Faith Fellowship during the last week. For all the sudden twists and turns of our adventures together, they were amazing in their flexibility, cheerfulness, and willingness to do whatever would be helpful. Most importantly, I was reinforced in the theme of Mission Adventures for this year: “The Kingdom of Heaven is near.” This does not mean that we should mark our calendars for some “Left Behind” scenario, or that by our own efforts we can construct a Communist/Socialist/Christian utopia. It means that when we look around, we recognize that this world is an unjust place. Broken. Confused. Not as it should be. But we recognize also the promise that one day, soon, it will again be made right. And until that day, we have the privilege and responsibility of proclaiming with our lives to the gods of this world—gods of pleasure, greed, selfish ambition—that their days are numbered. In the words of the chronicles of Narnia, “Aslan’s on the move.”