Several years ago, while I was praying, I saw a vision of walls surrounding the church. The walls were broken and crumbling, threatening to fail completely. God spoke to me that the walls represented marriages in our church–and that I needed to intercede, to literally “stand in the gap” for the marriages in our body. By God’s grace, many of the marriages that had been struggling during that time are now strong and many of the gaps have been rebuilt.

During my month-long stay in Mexico, I had an opportunity to “survey the walls” so to speak. I discovered that, at least in Jaumave, things are not well in the church, because things are not well in many marriages. Mexico is greatly in need of people who will stand in the gap for marriages.

While I was in Mexico, Jim and Caroline spent many hours counseling and praying with Manuel. Manuel’s wife, Lupe, recently took up with another man and has been threatening to leave Manuel for the other man. She has used the threat of leaving as a way to control her husband–if he attempts to discipline their daughters or enforce any boundaries whatsoever, she tells him she’ll leave. As a result, Manuel and Lupe’s five daughters run wild–the older ones introducing their very young sisters to much older men. The entire family is in turmoil. Manuel struggles with giving up hope. He struggles to be head of his home. Lupe openly rebels against God and her husband. The daughters pit father against mother, and do whatever they please. The church–seven individuals–is in peril because of the breakup of a marriage. Manuel and Lupe need people who will stand in the gap and help to rebuild the wall.

Tonio, the sixteen (now seventeen) year old boy who lived with us, was married via a shotgun wedding at age 14. He hasn’t seen his wife in at least a year, hasn’t seen his baby girl grow up. He’s growing in Christ–and that means he’s in a really tough spot. He alternates between crying over his wife and his baby girl and claiming that they mean nothing to him. He’s not sure if the marriage was legal–but he’s not sure that it wasn’t. He’s a sixteen year old boy–he gets crushes and has girls with crushes on him. He’s also married. Or at least, he might be. Tonio has to wrestle with what he is to do about his past, with what was done before he became a believer. Tonio needs wisdom to know how to proceed–how to mend his section of the wall.

Santiago started coming to church and to Jim and Caroline’s couples’ Bible Study alone. He and his wife were separated–the children lived with her. The group of couples started praying, and one Sunday Monica and the children showed up at church! Santiago and Monica and their two youngest came to visit us during my last week there. I enjoyed coloring with their little boys, but even more, I enjoyed the obvious testimony being played out before me. Santiago and Monica are seeking God together and God is rebuilding their marriage–and expanding their family. Monica is due anytime. By God’s grace, He is rebuilding the wall.

I gave three examples, but the trend reaches far beyond. Broken families abound. A man marries a new woman without obtain a legal divorce from his first wife. Couples move in together without getting married. A woman takes off to a different town with most of her children–she leaves one nine year old daughter behind. Young girls marry much older men as a way to escape the mountain villages. Daughters engage in prostitution. Adultery, fornication, bigamy, abandonment. And this in the church. The walls around the Mexican church are in desperate straits.

May the church respond as Nehemiah did when he received the report that the wall of Jerusalem was broken down. “So it was when I heard these words, that I sat down a wept, and mourned for many days; I was fasting and praying before the God of heaven.” (Neh 1:4) Nehemiah fasted and prayed. He mourned over Jerusalem. Eventually, he went to Jerusalem–to survey the wall for himself and to rally the people to rebuild it. I pray that God will raise up from among us Nehemiahs, who will pray and fast for the Mexican church–and some who will go and help to rebuild the wall. Please join me in praying for laborers to enter this field.

I have a hundred things to say about Mexico, but life isn’t stopping here to let me say them all. So I’m introducing a new feature: Mexico Mondays. I will be sharing a snippet from my Mexico adventures every Monday for the next however long. So tune in to hear what God did in me and others in July/August of 2008.

I’ve always thought it would be cool to be a teacher. It was on my list of top three career choices during high school. I’ve read up on it–probably way too much. But even more than being a teacher, I wanted to be a HOMESCHOOL teacher. After all, an ordinary teacher is limited by all sorts of things–government standards, boards of education, time, curriculum, and on and on. A homeschool teacher, on the other hand, can do it all. She can write her own curriculum should she so choose, she can set her own schedule, she can mix and match and have fun while she’s at it.

I’ve read a dozen dozen books on homeschooling, and taken notes on them all. I’ve read about the Classical education, the Montessori method, the Charlotte Mason method, the unschooling approach. I’ve read about homeschooling preschoolers, kindergartners, elementary aged children, middle-schoolers, and high schoolers. I’ve read about homeschooling certain subjects, about creating unit studies, about taking care of paperwork. And I’ve absorbed the ideas. For years and years, I’ve soaked up homeschooling theories, methods, and ideas.

But I’ve never really had a chance to put them into practice. Until last month, that is. Because last month, I went to Mexico to homeschool Rebekah. I arrived having no idea what grade she was in or what level she would be at. Because she’s fourteen and I’d been told she was behind, I guestimated that she would be somewhere between fifth and seventh grade. So my reading directly prior to going was focused on that stage–the transition from “learning the rules” (grammar stage) to “thinking through things” (logic stage). I arrived to discover that I was on the wrong track entirely.

The first day I was there, I got out the many books I had brought along and Rebekah and I started reading together. I quickly discerned that I was not dealing with a fifth to seventh grade student. Rebekah’s reading was halting. She was having a hard time decoding–just figuring out what the words said. She was definitely not ready to start thinking about what the words MEANT (looking at themes and literary devices and the like). I scaled down my expectations, prayed for wisdom, and started in.

Within the first few days, I learned some important things about my student. At fourteen years old, she is very self-conscious and afraid of being thought of as a child. Being behind in school only increases her nervousness. Unfortunately, that meant that she was scared to even put pencil to paper for fear that she would spell something incorrectly. She would rather guess at an unfamiliar word than sound it out, because she thought sounding out was a “baby thing”. She was desperately perfectionist–wanting everything to be perfect before she put it down on paper. She continually searched for my approval before answering any questions.

The first thing I did, to help her to overcome her fear of writing, was sit her down to do copywork. I opened the Bible to a passage and had her copy it out. Thus, she had a chance to work on her writing, to see how words are spelled correctly, and to see what some of the conventions of grammar are. The copywork served its purpose within the first few days, and then she grew frustrated with it. She thought it took too much time.

In the other subjects, which I was piecing together as I went, I started at too high of a level. I was discovering holes here and there and everywhere–and having to backtrack to cover them. But both her and I seemed to be getting frustrated at starting on one thing and then backtracking. Rebekah seemed bored with the schoolwork we were doing–yet it wasn’t because it was too easy. On the contrary, it was still above her level.

I wrote in my journal–“She’s bored with school work, Lord–what shall I do? Give me wisdom…” And God led me to Proverbs 3:5 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.”

I trusted God, and He provided. The next day, we began our new program. I shared with Rebekah what God had been speaking to me–then she did her journalling. We did math from a text–She played around with a mosaic while I read her a chapter from a book. We went over history–She taught me some songs in Spanish. We did spelling practice at the chalkboard–She reviewed her multiplication tables. She read from a book and answered questions about it. We played Yahtzee. We went back and forth, switching it up all the time. And it kept her interested for a few days. We tried a brief experiment with doing Hooked on Phonics–she wanted to do that instead of reading the book I’d picked (Mary Poppins). She changed her mind about doing Hooked on Phonics after she learned that I would not give her the answers.

She would continue to get frustrated with me when she would ask me if a certain answer is correct and I would return the question to her. “Well, does that answer the question?” I would ask. “If that’s the answer, then that’s what you should write down.” Initially, she took my response as a negative–that her answer wasn’t correct. So she’d try to ask me about something else. After a while though, I think she caught what I was doing. Then she started to tell me “I was just asking! There’s nothing wrong with asking.” And there wasn’t. I just wanted her to learn how to determine whether her own answers were right or wrong. Or, on other occasions, I wanted her to learn to sound out unfamiliar words instead of just telling her what the word was.

Those are the things you can’t learn about teaching from a book on homeschooling–or on pedagogy of any kind. I’ve studied learning styles and teaching techniques. I’ve studied material galore. I’ve read a thousand articles and hundreds of books. But they can’t tell you what individual issues you’ll come up against in the child you’re teaching. They can’t tell you about the heart issues behind behavioral issues. They can’t teach you about the passions that stay guarded. Only God can do that.

And by God’s grace, He opened my eyes to some of those issues as time went by. I discovered that my method of teaching history and science was a complete failure. It went in one ear and out the other. So God led me to do it differently. I discovered that I COULD NOT explain place values to Rebekah–despite trying for several hours (over the course of several days), I could not make it clear. Once I finally came to the end of myself, God told me how to teach–and she got it. She was writing extended form up to hundred thousands without aids after 20 minutes.

A new book, an abridged version of Jane Eyre, fell into our laps and we started reading it. Rebekah discovered her first favorite book. She has already read it over several times. A coincidence? I don’t think so. It was God’s grace. I opened an English text as I was sorting through the supplies that were there and discovered that it was just at the right level for Rebekah–and it was comprehensive enough to catch her up on all the grammar and writing stuff she hasn’t been doing.

When I arrived, Rebekah was a halting reader struggling with decoding and could only read out loud. When I left she was confidently reading silently. When I arrived, Rebekah was afraid to put pencil to paper because her spelling was so awful. By the time I left, she could write a page on a topic–with only two or three spelling errors. When I arrived, Caroline had all but given up on educating her daughter–she was exhausted, frustrated, and overwhelmed by the task. When I left, she felt she had a system that she could continue with despite the many distractions of their life in Mexico.

All this happened in four short weeks. Was it me? No way–I can’t accomplish that much. Maybe I am a good teacher–but I can’t take a student from a second/third grade reading level to a fourth/fifth grade reading level in a months time. Only God can do that. He made my time in Mexico more fruitful than I could have imagined. I am overwhelmed by the greatness of God.

Sidenote: I intended to tell you all about the curriculum I (by God’s grace) eventually set up for Rebekah–you know, what I actually ended up doing with all that homeschooling knowledge. But I got sidetracked by the greatness of God. I suppose that’s okay. But maybe someday I’ll tell you about the “curriculum”. ‘Cause I’m pretty excited about that too.

Yesterday, we took the day off of school and went to a mountain village named Seis de Enero (the Sixth of January). The church there is the first the family planted after arriving in Jaumave. Jim and Caroline pastored there for many years before handing the church over to another couple four years ago.

We picked up a hitchhiker on the way there–an old man who wanted a ride to San Lorenzito from Jaumave. We stopped halfway for a picnic, where we “visited the Oxxo”–a euphemism similar to “visiting Mrs. Murphy” (for those of you Cheaper by the Dozen lovers out there. Take a wad of toilet paper, find a convenient ravine where you won’t be seen. Do your business.)

When we did arrive, we sat in the church and visited for an hour or so before the service began. I got to meet an old man named Elefino, who has many awesome testimonies–bit by a rattlesnake just a week after he had been saved, he survived a five hour wait for medical treatment and is living today, ten years later. I shook hands and “Dios le bendiga”‘d the entire congregation, causing some children to hide their faces in their hands as I came by. My, but they were cute.

Caroline had gone off to talk to a friend, but we started the service without her. One person after another came up to lead the singing–they hadn’t had a service for a month and they were eager to worship. It was at least 40 minutes before the worship time ended. Elefino got up to share a dream he’d had–straight from the book of Revelation–a dream of Christ coming back for His people. A dream of Jesus saying He was coming quickly, at which Elefino, in his dream, fell on his face and said “Amen. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.” The dream is even more spectacular when you learn that Elefino has never read the book of Revelation–he couldn’t have because he can’t read. Another woman leads in more songs. A man stands up and sings some songs he wrote about Jim and Caroline–and about the missionaries from Grand Island who lost their lives in an accident on the mountains just days after sharing the gospel with the village of Seis de Enero. Jim is crying. A dog wanders up the center aisle and the woman who led singing earlier shoo’s him away.

Someone asks Caroline and I to sing, and we oblige, forcing Rebekah (who was quite unwilling) to come up and sing with us. We sing the songs Rebekah has been teaching me during our breaks at la escuela (school). Caroline accompanies us on the guitar. The entire congregation gets up and stands at the front of the church to sing us another song–this time they’re singing one I recognize. I quickly find “When the roll is called up yonder” in my “Alabanzas al Rey”–my songbook–and sing along with.

I share a five minute or so talk on hygiene–all about germs that cause colds and diarrhea, and how to avoid them. I teach the people about sneezing into their sleeve, about using a clean handkerchief, about washing their hands with soap after sneezing or coughing or using the restroom. They ask me to share about nutrition too–so I give them the very basics. What you need is fruits and vegetables, grains, and something with protein–eggs, beans, meat. The village people don’t have much education. They don’t know about these things we consider so elementary. They think that chips and a Coke make a good meal for their children. They just don’t know. I doubt my ten minutes had much impact, but I can hope and pray. They certainly listened intently–and even asked questions, particularly about preventing diarrhea. I tried to keep my message simple, but I still feel like I packed a lot of stuff into a very short talk.

Tonio shared his testimony and the congregation was riveted. I wished I understood Spanish better so I could hear it. I’ve only heard the most abbreviated version from Caroline and Jim.

Jim finally got up to preach and Caroline to interpret. We’d only been in the service a couple of hours or so by that point. He abbreviated his message terribly, but it still took a half an hour to forty-five minutes. We made our way out of the village as the sun was going down. I got some glorious pictures on the way back–sunset and the mountains, looking down over the valleys. Maybe I’ll post them when I get back. Currently, I’m doing all I can to adjust to the Spanish language and to the different keyboard.