Wow, it is my last day here in Guatemala. Time has flown by. It's hard to find words to describe it all because I have had so many amazing, powerful experiences here. Yesterday was a really beautiful day both in weather and what I experienced, I visited a women's shelter called El Refugio which was a wonderful, peaceful experience for me. I took some pictures for their ministry and then Kim and I were going to do a Bible study time with them which instead turned into a time of sharing about our lives with each other and sharing our prayer requests. It was such a peaceful time where I felt like I could really feel God's presence there among us but it was also heartbreaking to hear some of the women's stories. One girl named Michelle made a big impact on me. She is my age, only 19 years old but pregnant  and with a two year old son who had been sexually abused by his father. My life as a 19 year old is so drastically different and seemingly easy and trivial. It's very humbling when someone opens up their life to you, a stranger, and reveals their heart and their scars to you. My prayer request that I shared with them and with you reading this as well is to pray for that I will not lose the vision of God and Christianity and living that I have gained during my time here and that I will know how to talk about my time here with people back home, especially with my friends who aren't Christians or those who have a much different view of what it means to be a Christian than I do. After sharing about our lives, we had a time of "cloud prayer" where we all softly prayed out loud at once. As a photographer for the past two months, my first instinct was get up and walk to the back to take some pictures of this experience as I've often done during my time here. However, I always find that when I do this, I somehow distance myself from the moment and the people I am with as I'm behind the camera. I was about to get up when I just felt God pulling on my heart to stay in the moment myself and to simply be with him and to be in this community of women. I began praying in Spanish with them (well broken Spanish and a little bit of Spanglish but that's ok because God understands right?) and began to connect with God in a way that I had been missing in my attempts to capture him at work with my camera in the places that I've been here. It was such a beautiful way to wrap up my time here- just simply being with God.