Calvary Chapel Durango, Durango, Mexico

A little over a week ago, I asked you to commit to pray for the city of Durango, Durango, Mexico without having all the details to share. Well that was because, recently I was contacted by our friend Jonathan Sanchez who shared the vision that he had to go back home and be used by the Lord in a mighty way. He was living and working in Dallas, Texas for about a year. During his time there he felt the Lord stirring his heart to return to his home town of Durango, Durango, Mexico where he could use his unique God given talents to reach people for HIS kingdom. He attends a Calvary Chapel church plant and is starting a ministry in a local juvenile correctional facility there. He also paints graffiti (as seen in this video clip) with an evangelistic message to lead people in repentance to Jesus. Our ministry would like to provide him with prayer support, Bibles and possibly host a mission team there to help support this endeavor. I have asked him to post periodically on this blog to help keep everyone informed of his progress along the way. Below is his initial post and greetings from Durango, Durango.

Blessings,

It’s an honor to share what God is beginning to do in this city ”Durango, Durango, México. Our starting point is a ”Youth Detention Center” (Center of Reintegration and Treatment for Juvenile Offenders).

One of the ways to share the Gospel of God is through Graffiti and Skateboarding, I believe that God can use all of our talents but over all the things he uses our heart to share His love; like we can see in Matthew 25: ^{36 ”}I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me”.

Sending greetings from Durango,

Jonathan Sánchez

Youth Detention Center Durango, Durango, Mexico

One hundred miles north of Los Angeles lays the city of Santa Barbara, California. For now– I call this place home, however; if God wills it I will transcend the California coast life and call Guatemala a temporary home. My name is Jonathan Flores and I just graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara.  One of the biggest things I left college with, besides a broad education, is a stronger Christian faith. In a college that is notoriously known for it’s heavy partying, I found myself asking the question a lot of 18 year olds ask themselves: Where do I fit in? Some choose sports, fraternities, or clubs that they avidly attend. While those activities are not in any way all bad, I found myself asking the same question, “where DO I fit in?”  I was blessed to have a group of friendly guys invite me to a residence hall bible study and they didn’t just want numbers for attendance, they wanted to invite me to be part of what they were doing. In short, they were part of a Christian organization on campus that desired to give every student the opportunity to know Jesus Christ.

It wasn’t much later that I got involved with this community of faithful college students who desired to be “missional”.  Knowing God personally through His word really helped me understand what it meant to be on mission for Him. The bible opens up with a union (Adam and Eve) and ends in a union (Jesus and his followers, the “bride”), and God since eternity has always been God the Father. He is Father to many sons and daughters and this is seen through the covenant that God has made through the death of Jesus Christ. The cross not only forgives us from sin, but it also restores us to have a relational life with God. By the grace of God we can live by this beautiful truth, but in no way are we to stay idle. God has a mission for all his followers, and that is that we share the gospel of Jesus Christ with everyone.

This idea of being missional on campus and in my surrounding community became very important to me, not only because I wanted everyone to know the love and freedom that is found through Christ Jesus (John 6:27), but also because I wanted to share my life as a testimony of the powerful work that God does through his sons and daughters and how He yearns this for every living person. While praying about possible post-college jobs, I prayed about being on mission for God. I went to an event at a local church and saw pictures of a group who had gone to Guatemala. I saw pictures of homes being built and the poor being loved on. My heart sank and that night I prayed for the people of Guatemala.  I am a first generation American of Guatemalan parents, however, I am not familiar with the country or its needs. I understood how I can serve in Guatemala and knew I had to pray about going on missions there. Matthew 25:40 says, “The King will reply, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine you did for me.” God loves his children despite their backgrounds and this verse helped me see how I can be used by God to serve the people of Guatemala.

If you ask me today, where I fit in, I will firmly tell you that my identity is found in Jesus Christ and I am praying about bringing the gospel and love of Jesus Christ to Guatemalans.

On March 18th, Maribel and I will be driving to El Salvador  to hook up with our friends from Covenant Life Church in Jeffersonville, IN. This is the same group that Maribel served with last year in San Jose, Costa Rica. We are so excited to accept an invitation to join this medical mission team that will be working in a town near the Honduran border called San Miguel. The trip is being hosted by an organization called Open Eyes Ministries and it will be awesome to work together with them for the glory of God.  Please pray for this medical mission and all the logistical issues that are involved so that the people of San Miguel will be blessed and have a chance to experience the love of Christ through this team!

Recently some missionaries from Impacto Juvenil in Guatemala City came to our skate outreach in Coban and brought a visiting couple from Minnesota. Skateboard enthusiast Josh Longawa skated with us & shared his testimony. The Lord led he and his wife to bless a specific kid with a complete skateboard! So a couple of our skate cell group leaders and myself went to his home yesterday afternoon to meet his mother and bless his socks off!

We hope you enjoy the following picture presentations from the 2010 Skate Mission Trip to Guatemala. The presentations were created by professional photographer Heath Shelton, who can be contacted on his studio’s website.

Posted for your viewing pleasure below is the long-awaited video of this year’s skate mission team divided into four segments. Enjoy and if you like it, share this post with your friends or leave a comment below. We love to get feedback!

I just wanted to give a quick update about the new skate facility in Cobán. In a previous post titled, “It is Finished” I made the mistake of posting before going inside and seeing it with my own eyes. When I went in a few minutes after posting, I thought oh no because the water and electricity wasn’t even hooked up.

Now it is truly ready and yesterday the skate mission team helped us get the ramps inside the new facility. Today we will have the grand opening with music, prizes, contests etc. On Thursday, we will hold a skater Bible study for the first time in the new building. A skate session will follow and in the evening we will serve them hot dogs and show them the Spanish version of Livin it, an evangelistic film produced by the Palau Association that focuses on Skateboarding and BMX bike stunts. We are stoked about the eighteen decisions that were made for Christ on Sunday and now is the time to follow up with them to get them a base knowledge of the Word of God. Please continue to keep this ministry in your prayers.

The ramps are in & ready to go!

Check out this video summary of the first three days of our 2010 Skate Missions Team!

One of the six portable ramps

We are excited to announce that six portable ramps will soon be a part of our equipment for our Extreme Sports Ministry based in Coban, Guatemala. God is opening up doors so that we will be able to hold mobile skate sessions in different cities in Guatemala as well as other countries in Central America. We are currently in the process of purchasing the used ramps with the proceeds from a 2009 fundraiser. This will allow us the opportunity to have an even bigger impact in communities where extreme sports are rapidly growing in popularity. We hope to have them here before our skate mission team comes in July, so that we can use the ramps to do demos in local schools. It has been quite a challenge to find a way to get them to Guatemala. We have tried to get them here in the back of vehicles that are being driven down, to no avail. We also have tried to find someone who is already sending a container by barge to allow us to use one pallet’s worth of space. Please pray for us to find an efficient cost effective way for us to get these ramps shipped to Guatemala.

Maribel Rice with team members in Costa Rica

It was with lots of fears and nervousness that I left my country this time, since it was my first time flying alone. When I arrived in Costa Rica, I didn’t know how blessed I would be for two weeks. During the first week God showed me that sometimes you only have to be quiet and HE will do the rest. I spent the first fives days with a missionary family and I enjoyed the time that we shared together. I also worked with a group that had arrived at the Bible seminary where they live and serve. I enjoyed working in construction with the group so much that I was tempted to work with them instead of the medical team because I am not a doctor or a translator.

When the medical group arrived, I already knew about half of them even though I hadn’t spent much time with them before. The other half of the group were complete strangers, but in a short time I saw that they were wonderful people. In the beginning I doubted that I was where God wanted me, but that’s when I realized that sometimes, we ourselves may feel out of place and in reality we are exactly where God wants us. We worked in many different places with lots of different people that are really not much different from us. They were people that not only needed medicine, they needed to be loved and not just any love; it’s only the never changing love of God that softens the hardest of hearts! So my first mission trip outside of Guatemala, has filled my life with blessings because I was able to serve and God allowed me to get to know many awesome people!