Monday Minute: Prayers to start the week [May 24, 2021]

First thing: This title is a lie. A little technical difficulties yesterday meant that this blog didn’t get posted until Tuesday. We’re still calling it the “Monday Minute” because it sounds better. 🙂

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Now to the important stuff: This week we have so much to be thankful for. Honestly, we are just thankful that God brought us through last week all in one piece and with as few hurt feelings as possible. Last week was INTENSE! We’ll tell you about it below. If you want to get straight to the prayer/praise requests, just keep scrolling until you see the bulleted list.

The Lowdown: Last week was one for the books! We don’t know what type of book it would be. We lived through a choose-your-own-adventure book, a detective novel, and maybe wandered into the horror genre a few times. It was a crazy week, but by the end of it we’d packed a 40-foot shipping container and gotten our new (to us!) van to our place in El Salvador.

Who knew that transportation and shipping would be such a huge part of the SHIP experience? But here we are, more or less (definitely less) experts on international shipping. The work isn’t over, though much of it is out of our hands now. Unfortunately, it’s also in the hands of three different governments—US, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
Thankfully, it’s really in God’s hands. 

Here is what we’re praying and praising God about this week:

• Pray that the paperwork for the van will come together smoothly. The van is at our facility in El Salvador, but we don’t yet have proper tags. We can’t drive it until that happens, and dealing with a government office can be…well, we all know how it can be. 
• Pray that our container makes it safely to El Salvador without too much red tape to cut through. The container loading is just one part of the process, and, as big a piece as it is, it’s actually the least stressful part of the whole process. The paperwork that goes along with that container load is a nit-picky, meticulous job that involves labelling, numbering, weighing, and financially assessing each item that gets loaded. It’s every bit as exciting as it sounds (which is to say that it is REALLY boring). Now we just have to pray that the paperwork is accepted and that the container makes it out of our borders and through the borders of Guatemala and El Salvador.
• PRAISE the Lord that last week was successful. No, we don’t have answers to every question about the van or the container, but we have the van in our possession and the container is at the port. Those are huge answers to prayer.
• Pray for us as we get ready for our first SHIP Trip in over a year. This is a big one. We haven’t taken a group to El Salvador since we went at spring break in 2020 and got everyone stranded in El Salvador for a bit. It honestly wasn’t as bad as that sounds, but it was totally unexpected that we would take the same trip we’ve taken so many times before and that the world would just shut down while we were out of the country. So, please pray for us as we navigate uncharted waters and come to understand our new normal during these unprecedented times. [Note from Sara Horton: Y’all I’m sorry that I wrote that last sentence. I just had to throw in as many catch phrases as possible. Please forgive me.]