Day 6
Wednesday
Today was a day off. I slept in until 10 AM. I spent the morning chatting with my second cousins, roaming their yard taking pictures of their beautiful flora and fauna, and working on writing updates. Here are some of the pictures that Marcel and I took in their yard:
A sloth who was just as loathe to be disturbed from its slumber as Ellis was delighted to be disturbing it
A poison dart frog–one boiled frog provides enough poison for 50 darts
That afternoon we headed to the church for a 2 PM lunch. After lunch we headed to various houses of invalid church members and sang each of them two songs. Between houses, we came upon a man on his porch strumming away on his guitar. We requested a song and he played us a gospel song in traditional Latin-guitar style. While we were listening, we were surprised by a torrential downpour. Some of the choir members were staying at a house across the street, so we dashed under their porch roof to wait out the cloudburst, which was over in about 3 minutes. We then continued walking to the next house—dodging mud puddles in the dirt street the whole way. The next house was in the process of unloading a pig from a pickup truck where it had been residing along with a calf. The porker was decidedly unhappy about this turn of events and was squealing with all its might and main. I don’t believe I have ever heard an animal make that much noise. It alternately try digging in its feet and flopping on the floor as two men manhandled it along. One had a rope and was pulling and the other one was pushing. After that cacophony had subsided, we began our singing. A nice contrast always sets such things off nicely!
That night we gave our program. It was an amazing program. The spirit of God moved mightily. Ours eyes were brimming with tears, our hearts overflowing with love for God and our native brethren, our faces alive with expression, and our voices rich with meaning. The testimonies from the audience was a reaffirmation of how God worked. One lady had her mother have a cancer relapse and she said that listening to us gave her strength to go on. Another lady who had been resisting witnessing and overtures—and making it hard for her daughter to have spiritual contact with the church—said, “The singing was beautiful, but the best thing is that I could feel the presence of God.” Another man whom Marcos had been trying to get to come to church for years had finally come for the first time that night. The man told Marcos afterwards with tears in his eyes, “I’ll be back.” As we were discussing the service later, one of Marcos’ daughters—my second cousin—said something about “the other revivals” implying that the service was a revival meeting. Indeed it was! The Holy Spirit moved powerfully through the testimonies of us young people—somehow the generation gap makes testimonies and admonitions coming from young people more acceptable than those coming from older people. We opened our mouth and the Holy Spirit filled it, just as in Luke 12:11-12 (“take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say: For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.”). I opened my mouth and said one little thing that I felt the Holy Spirit wanted me to say and when Marcos was halfway through translating the phrase, I had another sentence from the Holy Spirit to say. Please be sure to note that this was all backed by a tremendous amount of prayer.
The fierce purchasers of machetes–amazing how a few colones can instantly make one macho
Trying out the real football
Our assistant choir director being himself
More pictures below the fold.
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