All in a Day's Hike

After living in Tucson for 3 whole months, we finally ventured out to the local recreational attractions which, as you can imagine, include cactus and desert. We packed a lunch this morning and drove to Sabino Canyon which is on the North East side of Tucson at the border of the Coronado National Forest. I still haven't seen much reason to call it a forest but it's a huge area so maybe we will get a chance to find the trees sometime. Sabino Canyon was recommended to us as a great place to start our adventures around here so we took the advice and drove over to the park. After paying for parking and getting a little direction from the visiting center we headed down the long paved road that goes into the canyon. The road is a very popular spot for walking, hiking, and riding bicycles and the only other traffic on it are the little trams that give guided tours of the canyon. The road follows the small brook that winds down through the canyon and along the way there are rest areas with bathrooms and places to sit and eat lunch. We started out right around noon, with 3.7 miles of paved road in front of us.

Our first exciting discovery was that the brook had water flowing in it and there were trees along the river bed turning nice shades of golden from the autumn weather.


This picture reminds me of verses in the Bible that talk about the man who is like a tree planted by streams. (see Psalm 1 and Jeremiah 17:7-8 for starters). Living in the desert gives you a lot of great pictures for images that are described in the Bible.

We stopped about half way up the paved road to eat our lunch and then kept trekking. The canyon walls got increasingly higher as we went further along and the rock formations and layers in the canyon walls were fascinating to see. We took lots and lots of pictures and then weeded through the ones that give a good representation of what we saw.

Finally, we reached the end of the paved road but our adventure was only half way over.

Our map showed us a trail that went back down towards the parking area but this path was half way up the canyon wall! Instead of turning around, we headed up the narrow trail and found ourselves overlooking the paved road from quite a ways up. By this time, my legs and feet were tired and it was starting to get hot from the sun. This part of the hike was lots of fun though because we saw some super tall catci up close and there was no one on the trail so it was quiet with lots of interesting things to look at and take pictures of.

All in all, we hiked close to 9 miles by the time we reached the car at 6 p.m. I was reminded of my days on STEP when I would hike 9 miles and then sleep on the ground and eat over a fire. Once in the car, I announced to Eric that I would be taking a bath and soaking my feet after dinner and enjoying our nice mattress in a climate controlled environment. A bath felt great! Our adventure today whetted our appetite for more exploring to come. Next time we might tackle one of the mountains that surrounded the city of Tucson.

A note for prayer: A couple weeks after we arrived in Tucson and did our first respite we shared that a family of four siblings was going home again to live with their dad and his girlfriend. This sibling group included the 3 year old boy that we loved to have fun with. Unforuntately, their dad made an unwise choice and the four children are back in GAP with little to no hope of going home again. They are living in the house that they lived in while they were here for 2 and a half years and now there are 15 children at Splash 4! Yikes! Please keep everyone involved in the situation in your prayers (including us because we are doing respite there right before we come home for Christmas!).

Newsboys Concert

Romans 12:21 says, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." This phrase is taken out of a passage about love and living at peace with others. It also talks about not repaying evil for evil. I have been thinking about this passage a lot because of all the dark influences tearing away at the kids who are in GAP. Rejection from family, abuse, neglect, and a sense of hopelessness is heavy upon these kids. Many of them immerse themselves in music, MTV, and other forms of digital entertainment that they can identify with or succeed in. I bring the kids to church and they will say to my face, "I love Satan" or "Jesus is gay". In this environment it is easy for me to believe that Christ is not as enticing and wonderful as He needs to be to break into their lives. I am tempted to believe Jesus is a better way of life instead of remembering He is a risen King with a growing kingdom! The foolishness of the gospel can feel like it is nothing more then foolishness on some days. The kids certainly seem to want me to believe that.

But God reminds me that He can break into this darkness with His irresistible light. I took four of the kids to a Newsboys concert who originally did not want to go because it was a Christian band. These were the same kids who had told me those nasty things about Jesus I mentioned earlier. However as the songs continued to play and thousands of individuals sang out their praise to God I could see these kids wrestling with the truth. Nothing these kids knew of was worth singing and dancing for and yet they were surrounded by people dancing with joy. I had a kid on my shoulders who was raising his hands and praising Jesus as we danced. (It was a high point of the night)

At the end of the concert a brief gospel message was presented and every kid I brought to the concert wanted to accept Christ. These kids need hope so badly. They need something worth singing and dancing about. Even though I have not the foggiest idea of how God spoke to their hearts that night or how they will be next time Bethany and I come to take care of them. God reminded me of something. He reminded me that He is glorious, He is light, He is irresistible, He is worth singing to, He is worth dancing for, and He can break into hopeless situations and give hope even to children who think their lives are so pointless that they should end.

God also has revealed to me that I do not fully trust Him to take care of these kids. I catch myself believing I need to do everything to train these kids to be successful in life and that burdensome responsibility I put on myself weighs me down. I need to do my part and then trust God, moment by moment, to do the rest.

Prayers: For Bethany and I to be able to trust God with these kids so much that discouragement does not hinder us and peace remains with us, even in dark situations.

Praises: God is bigger than me! He calls men to Himself with His love and glory. It is not my job to make God attractive or cool. He is holy, powerful, and majestic. He is entirely capable of revealing Himself as such. He did it for Paul and He did it for these kids. God cares for the lowly and has reminded me that His light and redemption outshines the darkness of hopelessness and sin! Praise God for that!

The New HP

Once there was an HP Pavilion Entertainment PC sitting in a warehouse somewhere in Shang Hai, China with an address for Tucson, Arizona. Before the journey of this laptop reached its end, it traveled from China to Alaska and from Alaska to Tennessee. From Tennessee it went to Tucson and landed at the door of Casa Madera apartment 11201--The Reinholds!!


You can imagine our excitement as we opened up the box and began setting up our new computer. Fortunately for us, Hewlett Packard sent us a nice set of directions to get us going in the right direction.


The first thing Eric did after we registered it, was to make sure we could have it run as fast as possible! It does go pretty fast although we have a slow wireless Internet connection that hinders it a bit. We can't complain about free wireless though. Now we are slowly adding things and figuring out how to customize it and make it our own. My own version of customizing it was to put a picture of our wedding ceremony as the background. Eric wanted a picture of Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings but I got to pick in the end.

Fall is back again in Tucson after a long hot spell. Today I turned on the heat because I was so cold in our apartment and it feels colder outside although all of you New Englanders would say it feels nice and warm. It got down to 60 in our apartment last night and wasn't getting past 65 with no heat on so that's when I decided to make it warm again in here. Tomorrow is pay day which means go shopping for pants and sweaters. Tomorrow night we start our next 5 day respite and that begins a period of hard work before we fly home on the 13th of December! We are certainly looking forward to that.