Joe Bunting

Mexico Part 6: Downey Soft!

Continued from yesterday’s post.

I was starting to get frustrated.

We’d been looking for 45 minutes and still couldn’t find the keys. I had prayed. We had prayed as a group. I told my story about the shark’s tooth to Chris, and paced around, certain, confident even that I would find the keys. Yet, here we were, still stuck on a dusty dirt road in front of the small house we just built. It was getting dark, and we were about to be in big trouble.

“What happens if we don’t find the keys?” I asked, cringing at the sight of the woman we were here to build a house for as she dug through our trash.

“We’re going to find them,” Chris replied.

“But what if we don’t?”

“We’re going to.”

“Chris,” I said, hoping he would answer my question. He paused and thought.

“Well, we could smash everyone into one car,” Chris replied, “and call a locksmith tomorrow. It’ll be expensive, and I don’t want to leave our car here in the middle of Mexico. We’ll come back tomorrow and it won’t have a radiator and it’s wheels will be gone. No that won’t work. We need to find those keys.”

I remembered the shark tooth and went back to praying and listening, sitting in the house thinking, trying to look busy so the rest of the group wouldn’t think I wasn’t being helpful.

Prayer is a funny thing,

especially listening prayer. You never really know for sure whether your being spoken to or if it’s just your imagination coming up with things. Anyway, I felt like God was telling me to go stand outside. Not to do anything, just to stand.

So I walked out of the house and stood in front, waiting, listening, feeling the breeze, and looking over the city which was starting to light up.

Yes, prayer is a funny thing. All of a sudden I felt this rushing of love all around me. I felt a bit what God was feeling for me, for my group, and for the family we were helping. “I love you,” it said like a gust of wind.

I smiled and said, “Me too.”

As I said it, there was a loud cheering from the car.

“What happened?”

I asked, after walking over.  I was pretty sure I already knew.

“Well, we had all given up looking,” Kathy said exuberantly.

“I was still looking!” said Megan.

“Ok, Most of us had given up,” she continued, “and so Garrett was joking around and picked up a roll of toilet paper and… Garrett, you tell it.”

“I picked up the roll and held it to my face,” he said while he demonstrated, closing his eyes and rubbing the roll of TP lovingly on his face. “And I said, ‘Mmm, downey soft.’ And then the key just FELL OUT!”

“Yeah, it had been inside the roll this whole time, and we had no idea.”

We were leaving. We said our final goodbyes to the family and got into our cars.

“There is a real Jesus!” Jessica said, as we were waiting for the stragglers to climb in. I just laughed and smiled.

Related posts:

Mexico Part 5: We Were Just About to Leave




Mexico Part 3: A Really Long Line




Mexico Part 4: Happens all the time




Mexico Part 1: The Day I Threw Up




Mexico Pt 2: The House

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Joe Bunting the Monk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.