After teaching at the Missions Institute in the Darien, the next day (Sunday) I get to preach at a different church. The pastor of this church was one of the students, and some of his members are taking the class as well.
Spending the night
We had spent the night at pastor’s mother’s house, a new structure still being built, built out of cement block, decorated with ceramic tile.
I unexpectedly find myself rejoicing at indoor plumbing. In comparison with the outhouses I had seen at the church, and most of the housing I had seen and expected to stay in, staying in this house felt like being honored like royalty. An audible gasp escaped my lips as we pulled up in the driveway, to the amusement of my driver.
At night, from the back porch, I could see the Southern Cross – a constellation that is not visible from where we used to be in the US. It looks like a giant kite in the night sky.
The only sounds were of typical night creatures — frogs, crickets, locusts, with the occasional mutter of a horse or moo of a cow. Quite the contrast from the city.
I crash pretty quickly from teaching in Spanish all day, so visiting was not something I got to do well until the next morning.
Fog covered the farm fields. The cool damp morning air smelled clean and refreshing. The only sounds were chickens clucking for some food, cows, and the occasional gunshot where farmers were scaring away birds.
After a small breakfast, we travel across the rutted dirt roads, around several farm fields to arrive at the Foursquare church right on the main highway. Our vehicle is covered in clay mud from the trip through the soggy road of red clay.
The pastor leads two churches on a circut, but for this occasion of my visit, he had the churches meet together.
Like the one I taught at yesterday, this church is a one room structure. For Sunday school classes, they uses some open sided gazebos that also serve as classrooms for a private school during the week. The school has about 200 high school students that meet 1x a week in a collection of these gazebos.
I took the picture above to show a sample classroom. It had been full of youth group aged kids.
During the week in my devotional time, praying for this Sunday, I felt led to share a message on having a daily time in the word of God. Sermons are fine, but we each need to spend our own time in God’s word. We pray for our “daily bread,” not weekly, monthly or yearly.
I had written out a manuscript ahead of time, as that is what I still must do for preaching to help weed out lots of grammar mistakes in Spanish. Where I got stuck with a word (some words don’t just roll off the North American tongue), the congregation pitched in.
After the service, we were invited back to the pastor’s house where we shared a meal. The house didn’t have a stove, so the meal was prepared in a pot over the open fire in a lean-to off the back of the house.
It was still good, but I found myself deeply grateful for the effort they were making to honor this American guest. I felt humbled at their meager living arrangements, yet grateful that we don’t live that way. We are still very blessed economically.
While waiting for the food to be prepared, I was given a lasso, and a task to try and get a fence post. What cowboy’s make look really easy, I discovered was near impossible for me.
The gentleman who drove me on this trip is trying to do this particular task. It’s not as easy as it looks, I promise.
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