2020

"Mama, no quiero ir. No quiero ir, mama. Mama, no!"  ( Mama, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go, Mama. Mama, no!) Luis looked up at me with his big, brown eyes, pleading to stay home from kindergarten. After several failed attempts, I finally scooped him up and said, "Yo puedo ir con usted."  (I’ll go with you.) He sat calmly on my lap for the entire drive, six other kindergarteners in the back. But as soon as we pulled up to the school he cried again, "Mama, no quiero ir!" "Voy a regresar en dos horas," I said to Luis. And to the others, "Quien quiere ayudar Luis?" ( I’ll be back for you in two hours... Who wants to help Luis?) All six kids surrounded Luis, taking his hands. He continued to cry as he walked to class, looking back at me over his shoulder, mouthing "Mama, no! No quiero ir!" My mama’s heart went out to him, though I knew he had nothing to be afraid of, and I knew he would...

I was sitting on the floor playing with 9-month-old Milly when our handyman Pablo walked into the room holding a toilet flapper. Assuming Pablo's task for the day was to repair the flush valve I asked, “Which toilet broke?” He knelt down beside me and replied, “Do you have gasoline?” “Gasoline?” I said. “You mean like an extra gallon?” “Gasoline,” he repeated. “We used to,” I said. Everyone seems to run out of gas in San Felipe, so we are constantly loaning out our gas can. “Ask Randy.” “Randy told me to ask you,” he said. “Me?” I couldn’t fathom why Randy would tell him to ask me for gas, unless he needed gas money and Randy didn’t have any money on him. So I asked, “Do you need money to buy gasoline?” “No,” Pablo said. “Randy said you have gasoline.” “Randy is crazy. I don’t have any gasoline.” Pablo shrugged his shoulders. “I will use a hose and syphon some from the boogie,” he said, referring to the dune buggy with flat tires sitting in ...

While hanging out at Loomis Basin Brewery on a Friday night a few weeks back, a friend of Randy’s daughter said to me: “You guys restore my faith in humanity.” It felt odd. Because to us we aren’t doing anything spectacular. We simply went where God told us to go. And frankly it hasn’t felt like we’re even serving anyone here in Baja these 10 months. More often than not it feels like we're just waiting to be useful.  But it did feel like we were serving when we were at a gas station in Lodi, California, and a woman and her daughter asked us for a dollar so they could get enough gas to get home. We didn’t have a single dollar. But we did have a credit card. So Randy pumped $6 worth of gas for them. They were embarrassed, humbled, and grateful. And it did feel like serving when we arrived in Bishop, California, to discover that hotel after hotel was all full. And finally we landed at a hotel that had one vacancy. As I filled out the paperwork a woman came in be...