As you may have guessed from the title, we are now in Chile, a land of absolutely spectacular landscape, blessedly cooler weather, and drivers who actually stop for pedestrians! Last week was a time of waiting for the right moment to leave for Chile and having a blast with the youth in the church as always. They almost didnt let us leave, even went so far as to barricade the door : ). It was really hard to leave them though, we had all gotten attached to each other. Its amazing how close you can get to someone in a week and a half even when they dont speak your language. They ran after our van waving until they couldnt see us any more. It was really touching, we are hoping to return to them for a few days after Chile. Actually, we had better return to them because at the moment they have possession of my (and Axis) suitcase. We decided that our suitcases were too big for the travel so we left them at the church. At the moment I am living for almost two weeks out of a backpack. Hallelujah. It is a good thing though because between all the car and bus rides I am glad to not have to worry about my suitcase.
So it took us about 30 hours to get here, 22 hours on a bus, then the rest in a car. The bus ride was glorious! 22 hours to rest, write, and sleep! The best part is that we rode a double decker and got to ride on the top, another one of my life goals accomplished! (haha). It was better than riding first class in an airplane. Plus, the scenery as we were crossing the Andes mountains was absolutely breathtaking. I tried to write about it so I will share some of it with you, but words just dont to it justice...."The farther we travel into this range, the views get more and more spectacular. Rivers and lakes of pure glass that reflect the splendor of the mountains with their carved edges and rising slopes that reach up to scrape the sky. Everything just fits, the sky seems even more beautiful when sprinkled with clouds and seemingly suspended between heaven itself and Gods own masterpiece of Earth. How lovely. I wish I could capture a piece of it and save it in time. But a pen and words are inadequate, I am not artistic at all, and a camera cant catch it all. So I am going to pray for these images to stay locked in my mind, for these are the times when I feel closest to God; when I can see His splendor and greatness reflected in His creation. When I can whisper any prayer and it just seems to swirl up to His ear with the warm, dusty wind. I know He is nearby at all times, but in some moments He just feels more accessile. Maybe that is why Jesus always went out by Himself to the mountains to pray...maybe He felt the same way."
Well, anyway our trip was for the most part enjoyable until we got stuck at the border because the officials thought Jennie was illegal. Apparently at the airport when we first got here, Jennies visa was stamped with the date 2008 instead of 2009. So it looked like she had been here for a year illegally. This caused a bit of tension to take care of, but thankfully everything got worked out to the tune of $. Tomorrow we are going to the island of Tabon for a few days, which I am very excited about!
Thanks to God for all of His provisions even when we dont ask, I will have many stories when I return. For now, thanks as always for the prayers!
Monday, February 23, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Feliz San Valentinos Dia!
Once again, you will have to forgive the lack of writing for two weeks, we had another week of almost no free time. Last week I had an update all ready to type up, but the only hour we had availale to visit the internet cafe turned out to be during a time when the internet was down for the day. Anyway, you can read last weeks update below.
So much has happened this past week that I am not sure how to summarize it for you, but to start, we moved to a church in Claypole on Monday. The church we are living in is a sister church of Emanuel, the home church of the hip-hop dance team we have worked with a few times before. Here we are basically working with both churches and it has been an absolute blast! Once again, the people are just so great to be around. The district of Claypole is a bit farther away from La Luz, where we had been doing all our work up until this point, so we left all the friends we were used to seeing everyday, but made new ones really quickly. The congregation of Emanuel is supposedly around 500 people so its quite a bit larger people wise than we have been used to, but this is useful for times like Kids Club because we get a lot of help! Speaking of KC, that started on Tues this time, due to the extensive outreach we had planned for the end of the week. Because of the extreme helpfulness of the church, everything ran reasonably smoothily, even when we were informed at 12am the night before that it was going to run for one more day than we had planned. I am a little worried about returning home and not knowing how to function with-what is that thing called?- oh yeah...a schedule. Surprises have become the spice of life here.
Like normal, after KC we had training time for the youth of the church. Now, usually (and quite preferably I might add) we have maybe around 25 people, at most, come for practice in the afternoon. Here, the first day we had about 30 people, the next day we had 45! Not only is that really hard to organize, but on top of this, Aaron was told he had to preach in the evening so he left to prepare. Also, there has been a bad cold going around so Axis and Fallow couldnt talk, and Hugo wasnt here. Thankfully, Dario-from Oscars church- ws there so we had one bilingual person, one spanish speaker, and three english speakers with less than stellar voices....to teach 45 people. Yeah, it was slightly stressful. But this day ended up being extremely bizarre in an amazing way. We started the afternoon teaching The Way of the Master evangelism concept which follows a series of questions that you ask people when you talk to them about the gospel. When we finished the lesson, Jen led a sample conversation with a volunteer, then we paired everyone into groups to practice amongst themselves. After about 15 minutes we were about to bring everyone back together when someone informed Jen that there had been a few non-christians in the room for some reason and what we were teaching made some much sense to them that they wanted to accept Jesus! Some of the practice conversations had been real! Talk about devine appointments! Now, we had to decide how to decide how to teach evangelism to the recently evangelized! Finally, we had everyone divided and were about to start drama practice when a few of the ladies of the church pulled us aside and told us that they felt there was a major issue of fear with the youth that was keeping some of them from participating and we needed to address it. Well, if anyone has authority on talking about conquering fears, its our school. So once again, we brought everyone together and talked to them about who they are in Christ and how He can free them from fear. Theres a drama we do called Masks (some of you may know it by King of Hearts) that represents different mask people wear to cover up a negative heart condition. This was the drama we were planning to teach and many of the youth identified with the characters in the drama and they wanted to be free of their masks. So we had an awesome time of prayer and by the time we actually started practice, it was almost time call it a day. Like I said, bizarre, but amazing! That night, we led two songs of worship and Aaron preached. In the beginning, he honestly stated that he had maybe half a page of notes for his sermon, but that he was going to be open to the Spirit and see what happened. Well, the service ended 2 1/2 hours later, complete with an amazing time of worship in Gods presence. Aaron had preached about faith and stepping out into what God wants for you. In the end, it was beautiful to see people give themselves completely to God. By 11:30, the end of the service, we cleaned up, fellowshipped and finished the day with dinner after midnight.
That was one day out of this week, believe me now when I say it was very busy? I would love to go into detail about the rest, but it would just take too much time, so here a brief overview. In the days after KC, we had a street presentation every day, sometimes twice. It was nice having an extra group of performers and Spanish speakers to help us. They would do their dances and we filled in the missing pieces. It was very hot and humid the last days of this week so we mostly did outreach around 11am or 10pm when everyone was out. Because of Valentines Day, there was fair in the area all weekend so that set things up nicely for us, lots of people were already out. I felt all the days went really well, everyone from the dance team got to share the gospel and there are getting excited about it. It is really encouraging to see them use the thins we taught them. Saturday was special because, being how it was V-day, there was a dinner show at the church. They told us they were planning for 1,000 people! While I dont think there was quite that many attending, there were a lot of people in that church. The night was nice though, different groups from the church performed dramas, dances or music and we got to do a drama too. The purpose of the dinner was to raise money for a missions trip, and to bring non-christians into the church. I believe the night was a success both ways.
One thing I have learned is that after this week I am not letting anyone know that I sing because if I hear, -Amanda, cantar! cantar Alleluia!- one more time, I may never open my mouth again. The night of the dinner, we went onstage to thank the church for everything they had done for us and they shoved a mic in my face and started chanting for me to sing. Awfully embarrassing. Right now I couldnt sing if I wanted to because my voice is sour and tired from being made to vocalize opera several nights in a row after midnight. Sheesh.
Anyway, as far as Chile goes....it looks like we may be leaving later than we had planned and no one from this church can go with us, which makes me terribly sad. Only two people from the other churches are going with us. We are praying for more because we really want to do a lot of outreach and having only our team makes this hard.
So thats about it for now. Please pray for our health, for some reason someone from my team has been sick at every church we have stayed at. So far I have been fine-nothing majoy- but please pray for the others.
As always, I miss and love all of you!!!
So much has happened this past week that I am not sure how to summarize it for you, but to start, we moved to a church in Claypole on Monday. The church we are living in is a sister church of Emanuel, the home church of the hip-hop dance team we have worked with a few times before. Here we are basically working with both churches and it has been an absolute blast! Once again, the people are just so great to be around. The district of Claypole is a bit farther away from La Luz, where we had been doing all our work up until this point, so we left all the friends we were used to seeing everyday, but made new ones really quickly. The congregation of Emanuel is supposedly around 500 people so its quite a bit larger people wise than we have been used to, but this is useful for times like Kids Club because we get a lot of help! Speaking of KC, that started on Tues this time, due to the extensive outreach we had planned for the end of the week. Because of the extreme helpfulness of the church, everything ran reasonably smoothily, even when we were informed at 12am the night before that it was going to run for one more day than we had planned. I am a little worried about returning home and not knowing how to function with-what is that thing called?- oh yeah...a schedule. Surprises have become the spice of life here.
Like normal, after KC we had training time for the youth of the church. Now, usually (and quite preferably I might add) we have maybe around 25 people, at most, come for practice in the afternoon. Here, the first day we had about 30 people, the next day we had 45! Not only is that really hard to organize, but on top of this, Aaron was told he had to preach in the evening so he left to prepare. Also, there has been a bad cold going around so Axis and Fallow couldnt talk, and Hugo wasnt here. Thankfully, Dario-from Oscars church- ws there so we had one bilingual person, one spanish speaker, and three english speakers with less than stellar voices....to teach 45 people. Yeah, it was slightly stressful. But this day ended up being extremely bizarre in an amazing way. We started the afternoon teaching The Way of the Master evangelism concept which follows a series of questions that you ask people when you talk to them about the gospel. When we finished the lesson, Jen led a sample conversation with a volunteer, then we paired everyone into groups to practice amongst themselves. After about 15 minutes we were about to bring everyone back together when someone informed Jen that there had been a few non-christians in the room for some reason and what we were teaching made some much sense to them that they wanted to accept Jesus! Some of the practice conversations had been real! Talk about devine appointments! Now, we had to decide how to decide how to teach evangelism to the recently evangelized! Finally, we had everyone divided and were about to start drama practice when a few of the ladies of the church pulled us aside and told us that they felt there was a major issue of fear with the youth that was keeping some of them from participating and we needed to address it. Well, if anyone has authority on talking about conquering fears, its our school. So once again, we brought everyone together and talked to them about who they are in Christ and how He can free them from fear. Theres a drama we do called Masks (some of you may know it by King of Hearts) that represents different mask people wear to cover up a negative heart condition. This was the drama we were planning to teach and many of the youth identified with the characters in the drama and they wanted to be free of their masks. So we had an awesome time of prayer and by the time we actually started practice, it was almost time call it a day. Like I said, bizarre, but amazing! That night, we led two songs of worship and Aaron preached. In the beginning, he honestly stated that he had maybe half a page of notes for his sermon, but that he was going to be open to the Spirit and see what happened. Well, the service ended 2 1/2 hours later, complete with an amazing time of worship in Gods presence. Aaron had preached about faith and stepping out into what God wants for you. In the end, it was beautiful to see people give themselves completely to God. By 11:30, the end of the service, we cleaned up, fellowshipped and finished the day with dinner after midnight.
That was one day out of this week, believe me now when I say it was very busy? I would love to go into detail about the rest, but it would just take too much time, so here a brief overview. In the days after KC, we had a street presentation every day, sometimes twice. It was nice having an extra group of performers and Spanish speakers to help us. They would do their dances and we filled in the missing pieces. It was very hot and humid the last days of this week so we mostly did outreach around 11am or 10pm when everyone was out. Because of Valentines Day, there was fair in the area all weekend so that set things up nicely for us, lots of people were already out. I felt all the days went really well, everyone from the dance team got to share the gospel and there are getting excited about it. It is really encouraging to see them use the thins we taught them. Saturday was special because, being how it was V-day, there was a dinner show at the church. They told us they were planning for 1,000 people! While I dont think there was quite that many attending, there were a lot of people in that church. The night was nice though, different groups from the church performed dramas, dances or music and we got to do a drama too. The purpose of the dinner was to raise money for a missions trip, and to bring non-christians into the church. I believe the night was a success both ways.
One thing I have learned is that after this week I am not letting anyone know that I sing because if I hear, -Amanda, cantar! cantar Alleluia!- one more time, I may never open my mouth again. The night of the dinner, we went onstage to thank the church for everything they had done for us and they shoved a mic in my face and started chanting for me to sing. Awfully embarrassing. Right now I couldnt sing if I wanted to because my voice is sour and tired from being made to vocalize opera several nights in a row after midnight. Sheesh.
Anyway, as far as Chile goes....it looks like we may be leaving later than we had planned and no one from this church can go with us, which makes me terribly sad. Only two people from the other churches are going with us. We are praying for more because we really want to do a lot of outreach and having only our team makes this hard.
So thats about it for now. Please pray for our health, for some reason someone from my team has been sick at every church we have stayed at. So far I have been fine-nothing majoy- but please pray for the others.
As always, I miss and love all of you!!!
Update for two weeks ago
We have retuned to our first home church this week, De la mano con Jesus (Pastor Oscars church). It was crazy how thrilled we were to be back, this building is nothing special, we dont have a seperate room or hot water, but in this church is where most of our friends are. Its also the church where we feel theres the most passion and spiritual outpouring. I wish you all could attend a worship service here. Its like killing two birds with one stone, you get an amazing time of worship and fellowship, and your complete calistentic worship for the day : ). People here just seem to be so driven to learn the things of God. The youth in this church follow us everywhere, evangelize with us and we have pretty much taught them everything we know as far as drama/dances are concerned. Of course, this also means we are never alone, but we are used to this by now. This past week has been a week of prayer for the church which is something that they do every month. For seven days they meet together at 7 am to pray for an hour. This is a lovely concept, excluding the fact that going to bed at 2am and arising at 6:30 does not make an all too effective prayer time for me, at least not at first. By the end of the week I learned to push past the fatigue because time with God has become a necessity for everyday and the morning is usually the only time I have. Anyway, usually when the service ended most of the people stayed to spend time with us and prepare for kids club (once again), after KC is training time, then we do some type of ministry/evangelism in the evening. So its pretty much the same schedule as always, -up early, then busy, busy , busy til 10, then party all night : ).
There were a few special highlights to the week too. On weds. we went to pastor oscars house for a Columbian meal, cooked by the two young columbian guys that are staying with him right now-Manuel and Christian. It was really good food, though personally I think Sounth Americans could get more creative than meat, meat, bread, meat, meat, rice, meat, chicken etc. : ), but I digress...its delicious! Thurs night we ate at the house of a young couple of the church who are both hilariously entertaining and they made pizza for us, so you know...instant friends, haha. Friday night was a dinner for the youth. We had a huge barbeque outside that lasted til the wee hours of the morning. There was also dancing (I tried my feet at Salsa) and freestyle rap and reggae from three guys of the church and Aaron who has to try everything at least once (including the cow intestine that was served that night...mmm).
I feel I should also mention that I now have four kids. It started out at Fernandos church, there is a baby there that Aaron and I were always holding so some of our friends called him my hijo (son). There is also a 13 year old girl named Sophia who calls me her mami and she basically lives with us, shes here so much. Her best friend soon caught on, as did the little boy who lives next door and smothers me with kisses. So my family is steadily growing. It has gotten to the point where I answer to Mami and have received so many gifts of stuffed animals, pictures, and cards that I am going to need another suitcase to come home!
All in all time flew this week and its time to move on yet again. I cannot believe that our trip is now past the halfway point! After next week, we are leaving for Chile where we will spend two weeks. I can look back on the past 5 1/2 weeks and laugh at how I have gotten so happy about the small things - like adequate hydration and reasonable hygiene. I can also say that there has never been a time in my life when I have needed to live outside of myself and rely on God as much as here. I am excited for the next half of the trip!
There were a few special highlights to the week too. On weds. we went to pastor oscars house for a Columbian meal, cooked by the two young columbian guys that are staying with him right now-Manuel and Christian. It was really good food, though personally I think Sounth Americans could get more creative than meat, meat, bread, meat, meat, rice, meat, chicken etc. : ), but I digress...its delicious! Thurs night we ate at the house of a young couple of the church who are both hilariously entertaining and they made pizza for us, so you know...instant friends, haha. Friday night was a dinner for the youth. We had a huge barbeque outside that lasted til the wee hours of the morning. There was also dancing (I tried my feet at Salsa) and freestyle rap and reggae from three guys of the church and Aaron who has to try everything at least once (including the cow intestine that was served that night...mmm).
I feel I should also mention that I now have four kids. It started out at Fernandos church, there is a baby there that Aaron and I were always holding so some of our friends called him my hijo (son). There is also a 13 year old girl named Sophia who calls me her mami and she basically lives with us, shes here so much. Her best friend soon caught on, as did the little boy who lives next door and smothers me with kisses. So my family is steadily growing. It has gotten to the point where I answer to Mami and have received so many gifts of stuffed animals, pictures, and cards that I am going to need another suitcase to come home!
All in all time flew this week and its time to move on yet again. I cannot believe that our trip is now past the halfway point! After next week, we are leaving for Chile where we will spend two weeks. I can look back on the past 5 1/2 weeks and laugh at how I have gotten so happy about the small things - like adequate hydration and reasonable hygiene. I can also say that there has never been a time in my life when I have needed to live outside of myself and rely on God as much as here. I am excited for the next half of the trip!
Monday, February 2, 2009
Side note
By the way, I thought it relavent to mention that keyboards here are different than what I am used to, therefore please excuse my terrible punctuation in the updates...I havent found all the correct keys yet.
February now!
Happy February everyone! I cant believe our first month here is over already! This week we have been staying at Darios church (he is one of our Argentine friends who is always with us helping in anyway he can, he also learns our dances/dramas insanely fast) which has been an interesting setup. The church only has one main room and then Dario and his family live upstairs. So we girls sleep on the stage and the guys take the rest of the sanctuary. Due to the lack of readily available showers I am not going to mention how long it has been since I have been completely clean, but I am learning to live like a missionary : ).
This past Tuesday we got to take a short sight-seeing trip to the main city part of Buenas Aires. Our friend Diego gave us a tour around the club soccer stadium, the harbor, and lots of creatively painted houses (by creatively I mean with as many colors as possible). That evening we traveled two hours by bus to a tiny newly planted church to do a presentation and pray for/encourage the people there. Wednesday we joined with our Impact team and went to present with another church which has a hip-hop dance team. We combined our three teams and minstered together. It was a cool evening, everything went well and many people came back with testimonies about how God used them to llead others to Christ. We may be working with this church again later, which I would love, they are a lot of fun.
Thursday brought the inevitable Kids Club again, and quite a bit of stress for me. I was team leader this week (we take turns) so I was in charge of the planning and preparing. It really wasnt that bad except that the first day, none of our helpers (as in people who could speak Spanish to the kids) showed up until half an hour after we started..and then there were only three of them. At least we only had 45 kids, any more than that and I dont know what we would have done. The rest of the week ran like the others, Kids club on Thurs, Fri, and Sat. until 1pm, then teaching evangelism to the teens of the church. Friday we did some street evangelism with them and got to have some interesting conversations with people. Since we break off into groups we always gather together at the end and share about what our experiences were like. There is always a mixture of people who received the gospel and those who just wanted to talk, but for the most part everyone loves to hear what we say - which surprises me in a way.
Yesterday we had a big event in another plaza. We spent the afternoon doing evangelism in the street and inviting people to the event in the evening. We did some presentations, talked to people, and then played Chronicles of Narnia with a projector on a sheet in the middle of the plaza. All in all the evening went well despite some discouragement after our earlier presentations in the afternoon each had something go wrong. We were all rather distracted that night or something, but after lots of prayer, we approached the evening with new attitudes and everything ran smoothly..for the most part (it would be nice if we could control when the stray dogs decide to perform with us or keep them from marking all of our equipment!).
Today as always is our day to relax as much as possible in the presence of lots of guests at the church. Sadly, Jen is not with us at the moment in the internet cafe because she woke up this morning feeling very sick. Hugo was sick earlier so she might have caught what he had. Please keep our health in your prayers, it seems like someone is always sick with something.
This past Tuesday we got to take a short sight-seeing trip to the main city part of Buenas Aires. Our friend Diego gave us a tour around the club soccer stadium, the harbor, and lots of creatively painted houses (by creatively I mean with as many colors as possible). That evening we traveled two hours by bus to a tiny newly planted church to do a presentation and pray for/encourage the people there. Wednesday we joined with our Impact team and went to present with another church which has a hip-hop dance team. We combined our three teams and minstered together. It was a cool evening, everything went well and many people came back with testimonies about how God used them to llead others to Christ. We may be working with this church again later, which I would love, they are a lot of fun.
Thursday brought the inevitable Kids Club again, and quite a bit of stress for me. I was team leader this week (we take turns) so I was in charge of the planning and preparing. It really wasnt that bad except that the first day, none of our helpers (as in people who could speak Spanish to the kids) showed up until half an hour after we started..and then there were only three of them. At least we only had 45 kids, any more than that and I dont know what we would have done. The rest of the week ran like the others, Kids club on Thurs, Fri, and Sat. until 1pm, then teaching evangelism to the teens of the church. Friday we did some street evangelism with them and got to have some interesting conversations with people. Since we break off into groups we always gather together at the end and share about what our experiences were like. There is always a mixture of people who received the gospel and those who just wanted to talk, but for the most part everyone loves to hear what we say - which surprises me in a way.
Yesterday we had a big event in another plaza. We spent the afternoon doing evangelism in the street and inviting people to the event in the evening. We did some presentations, talked to people, and then played Chronicles of Narnia with a projector on a sheet in the middle of the plaza. All in all the evening went well despite some discouragement after our earlier presentations in the afternoon each had something go wrong. We were all rather distracted that night or something, but after lots of prayer, we approached the evening with new attitudes and everything ran smoothly..for the most part (it would be nice if we could control when the stray dogs decide to perform with us or keep them from marking all of our equipment!).
Today as always is our day to relax as much as possible in the presence of lots of guests at the church. Sadly, Jen is not with us at the moment in the internet cafe because she woke up this morning feeling very sick. Hugo was sick earlier so she might have caught what he had. Please keep our health in your prayers, it seems like someone is always sick with something.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
