The view from my window…

When you look out my window about 5:30AM, if the sky is a purple shade of clear, you can see the volcano Cayambe (kah- yahm- be) clearly stretching up into the horizon over the other peaks nearby it. It stands there, silently capped with snow, posing behind a foreground full of streetlights and houses of all shapes and sizes and income levels. This is Quito. Each direction you look, and each time of day you look, everything is slightly different from the moment before. Our apartment here in the lower floor of an older house, is located on the side of the lower slopes of another volcano called Rucu Pichincha. From here we walk a flat 30 yards and then make a hard left turn downhill, dodging taxis and buses all the way to our international school. The trip back home is a whole other cardiovascular experience.

But more than what I see geographically, I see other things as well. I see a school community, composed of teachers and students from a variety of places and backgrounds. I see a diverse parent community, with hopes and dreams and fears just like families in Birmingham, who struggle with teenagers and marital issues and special needs kids, and every other thing under the sun.

Besides the multiple array of cultures represented in the school, there are multiple economic levels represented as well. Some families have been graced by God to be scholarship recipients for their kids to attend. Literally, some parents and students and siblings are sleeping in tiny apartments nearby on foam mattresses, while the parents travel to work an hour away each morning as their kids go to school.

I even know one case with a sibling group of young Ecuadorian kids who are being cared for and educated here at AAI, whose parents aren’t even truly identified at this point, because the person they were living with has multiple identities. Neither the courts or the school knows the ages of these kids, because the documents just plain don’t exist for the environment where they were born. There are parents who have chosen careers over their family. They make a really good living by being gone, and I mean gone all the time. They choose the school because they hear that it has good values, and a US style of teaching. Then we get to deal with the aftermath of missing discipline in the kid’s lives. So North American culture has no monopoly on interesting family situations. This is at least some of what I see.

Bottom line is this. The Gospel has power to save, and this I clearly see. I have been specifically asking in recent days for God to use AAI to save many women and men. So yesterday when I met and shared a word about disciple-making with a group of Latin American pastors who volunteer at the school, one of them told me how a lady came to the office in the last couple of days to meet for counseling. This parent shared that she was not a Christian, but her husband was a Christian. She continued by saying that after she came to AAI this year with her child, she saw that the Christianity that her husband claimed to have was nothing like the Christianity she was seeing from people at AAI, and she wanted to know Christ like that! My Latin American brother was able to share Gospel truth with her and see her trust in Jesus Christ to save her soul that day. So, as I looked out my window this morning in the chilly air, I didn't just see geography, but I saw clearly yet again how God answers our prayers that glorify His Son, even when we can’t see or imagine the end result.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
(John 1:14 ESV)