Beauty

I had a good night in Tena, visiting with expats, eating good food and all that. I met some girls from California that I talked to for a while and had a great time with. Michelle gave me some ad hoc salsa lessons and said I was catching on! I got to share a little of Christ with them, but wasn't quite as resolute as I could have been. Next time. There's always next time to be more like Christ.

I read II Peter today and realized that the promises he is talking about are things like Jesus said about repenting from your sins and receiving forgiveness. It's putting our faith in those promises that motivates us to grow through moral excellence, knowledge, self-control, patient endurance and all that. After all, when we realize that it is Christ alone and the forgiveness of God that purifies us, we are motivated out of thanks to respond by honoring God.

That said, yesterday was incredibly purifying. I rafted in Tena with an Irish guide who has lived in Tena since he was 14. His family runs the Riverpeople rafting company and rafting with them, in Tena, is the absolute best rafting in the country. Go with the Riverpeople! We went cliff jumping and waterfall sliding before hitting the river for the day. There was a diverse group with 4-5 in two rafts. Mostly British girls and a couple from Canada. I teamed up with the Canadiens and the guide Tim for an amazing day of all kinds of terrain from thick jungle to grassly lowlands surrounded by green mountains shimmering beneath the intense Ecuadorian sun.

Lunch was along the river with the local village kids coming up to stare, play and get our leftovers. The rapids were exhilerating, but managable (nothing too life-threatening, Mom) and there were several places to jump out of the raft and swim. The most memorable event on the trip was the raft ahead of us hitting a wave, going straight up, and then curling over to fully inverted, like a back flip, and seeing everyone in the boat falling out. And then realizing that we were intentionally heading for the same spot =). Good times. Our raft did more of a tornado, backwards surfing type thing there.

I could write a lot more about the rafting trip, but I digress. After returning to Tena, I met up with Becki again to head toward Quito. We took a taxi north to a place called Paraiso de Orchida, which is an animal refuge. I made friends with a monkey named Lucho and did some walking through the actual jungle there. I needed a machete.

We ended up waiting by the side of the road for a bus to Quito with some of the local town people. They were really nice and helped us figure out which bus to take. So we ended up outside of Baeza at a highway junction trying to pick up the next bus, and decided not to keep traveling because Quito at night is dangerous, so we found a cheap hotel where we could each get our own room and crashed (after eating across the highway of course).

I'll write more about the Hacienda de Esperanza later, but today we basically took the bus to Quito, met up with Cecilia (Jon's wife) and drove north to the Hacienda. It's a home for several orphans and is a part of a larger missionary effort called Operation Ecuador. Lots of cool connections all over the place up here... staff from Seattle, Washington and Pensacola, Florida (where my preacher at home is from!) Time to stop typing though. Night!