Backstory
How the seed was planted and how it grew:
February 2003: I'm at an Automotive Repair Shop repairing their equipment and in speaking to the owner he mentioned that he just got back from Hawaii, where he had been for the last month.
What!? You've got to be kidding me! How can you take a complete month off? This is beyond my comprehension, so I asked: Doesn't your business fall apart? To which he replied "My business falls apart every January, whether I'm here or not. I might as well be somewhere I won't stress about it."
Who does that? Who takes a month off?
The seed was planted in my mind...
For more than 10 years, as each February approached, my mind was filled with thoughts and dreams of taking a month off and going somewhere warm. . What had started out as a "wow that's cool he does that", moved from "what if I could do that" to "I need to do that!". Wow, my business slows down considerably each February. Is that a possibility? How can I take a month off, I'm self employed? How can I lose a month of pay? Well it is a slow month, with less pay anyway... Hmm, I wonder if I could actually pull that off?
The thoughts of taking a month off and spending it somewhere warm filled my furthest off fantasies. Ahhh, I can feel the warmth of the sun as the thoughts would melt through my soul. Each year as winter sets in and the cold freezes the soul, my desires multiplied.
Then in 2013 the dream changed.
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I repair automotive equipment for a living and every day I move from repair shop to repair shop fixing their equipment so that they, in turn, can repair cars that come in.
A typical user of my equipment is often spanish speaking. For some reason God had stirred in my heart a love for latinos, really in particular people from Mexico.
Often times the users of the equipment I repair, the "Tire Busters" (as they are called, because they use to change tires with brute force) would be unable to effectively communicate the problems with their equipment. That posed a problem. If you don't know what's wrong, it’s difficult to fix it. Additionally, sometimes there are things that I can teach them, but it's more difficult if we can't communicate.
I longed to communicate and understand them. However this presented to be a near impossible task as Spanish was not in my vocabulary.
Each day I would try to learn a spanish word and use it throughout the next few weeks. As I got older, the ability to hear the different sounds in another language became more difficult, but I was determined to learn. It was a very, very, very slow process.
Then the desire to speak Spanish was magnified in 2013.
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In early 2013 I discovered that a friend at church was planning a group trip to an orphanage in Mexico. The second I learned about it my heart jumped for joy! There was no way that I would miss going on that trip! I can't describe the "all in" feeling I had when it was revealed!
Each year, for the last 7 years, without fail, I attended the trip with our church group. Each year I saw the orphans and watched them grow and mature. Each year we would play games with them, we would painted their houses, we fixed plumbing and electrical, we ate with them, we sat and talked with them.
We also watched them grow:
The 1 year olds grew to be 8 year olds.
The 8 year olds grew to be 15 year olds.
The 15 year olds grew to be 22 year olds.
One 18 year old young lady grew to become a beautiful 25 year old that completed her psychology degree in college and now returns to counsel the orphans. This is my friend Isabel...
These children had been rejected by their parents or there parents were just not capable of caring for them. In fact it's actually worse than that, in Mexican culture, children that are not able to be cared for by parents are often sent to aunts, uncles, grandparents or cousins to be cared for. When a child is in an orphanage the complete family has abandoned the responsibility to care for them. It hurts me to think of the children's pain of rejection and feelings of being unwanted.
Each year as I visited these orphans, I began to know and understand them more. My desire to learn spanish has grown exponentially each year.
Then 2019 happened
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2019 was the 3rd hardest year in my life.
It wasn't the hardest... or even the 2nd hardest... but boy was it hard.
For those of you that know me, you have a hint of the heartache that I experienced. For those of you that don't know, well buy me a drink and I'll tell you a sob story.
The lesson that I learned that year was: Be careful what you think of. What fills your thoughts will change the course of your life.
Out of the ashes of 2019 arose the possibility to realize my dream that had spurred my heart and soul to excitement, each February, for close to 20 years.
I WAS TO SPEND FEBRUARY 2020 IN MEXICO AT THE ORPHANAGE!
