Journey back home!!!!

We woke up bright and early at 3:30 (well, not really bright, it was still dark...), loaded up the van, and fell asleep again. :) I slept for another 4 hours, until the sun came up, another beautiful sunrise!! Everyone woke up slowly and we crossed the border around 8:15. We were stopped by the military again, this time, however this time they made us all get out. Thankfully we were all awake when we crossed the border. :) When we were crossing the Rio Grande, we sang the National Anthem, and Mel recorded it. She still had her camera out when we got to the border patrol, and they "confiscated her camera and made us all get out of the van while they searched it. A van, with an x-ray inside of it, which was kinda cool to watch. After some rigorous searching, we were on the road again. We drove for another 3 hours without stopping, and Lori decided she couldn't wait any longer and we pulled over and she took her orange trowel and went on the side of the road!!! In TEXAS!!! We were in such a hurry to get home, we stopped at a gas station for lunch, grab our food real fast and jumped back in the van to continue our voyage home. We were all just giggling and laughing at all our funny moments and next thing you know, our conversation turns completely serious and we all opened up and had some incredible discussion about the trip and the things we learned, about our favorite parts and our least favorite parts. It's amazing what God can do in an instant. We started to get a little hungry, and almost simultaneously, we (the students) had this brilliant idea to buy the leaders dinner. We wanted everyone to be able to sit down and talk (we hadn't sat together as a group the whole week). After much debate, we stopped at an Arby's and somehow got our food correctly (there was some poor management...) and were able to just sit and talk. Lance opened up to us about how he felt the trip went and we told him exactly what we thought...WE LOVED IT!!!! About 30 min later we hopped in the van again, and headed home. Sarcastically I said, let's say our favorite thing about each other, well, Lori took it seriously and so for the rest of the drive home, we simply encouraged each other. Talk about cool. This pretty much blew Paco's mind...here we are, a bunch of teenagers and we're sitting in a van talking about Christ and each other so positively. He didn't stop going on about it! We made Chris (the leader) cry because of how much of a leader we all were at age 16, 17, 18. Mel couldn't stop complimenting us either! It was so cool, probably one of the coolest "drive-backs" I've ever had. I will never forget some of the things people said about me (it's crazy how you see yourself one way, and everyone else sees you differently). You were all such an encouragement to me, I hope I spoke half as much life into you as you did to me. Well, that's about it--we got home at midnight Sat (the next morning was Easter). I went with some people to IHOP (as always) and we sat and talked for some time. I think I finally made it home around 1, and took a much needed shower (I think it was 4 days...), and fell asleep around 2am and woke up bright and early at 7 for Easter Sunday!!

Thanks for sticking through this all and reading it! It's amazing all God did in me. I'll be posting what I learned from people and from My Jesus in the next few weeks!