Yum, yum- good eatins'! Seriously it was (and, yes, that's a leaf)
Elina (left) and Carey (right)- two girls who hung out in my and Jodi's hotel room for a while
The clothes-washing station at the San Miguel church. They used something similar to this to wash our dishes as well.
Today, we rose bright and early, dressed and had migrated to the church for breakfast by eight. Ester fixed us up some oatmeal (which actually contains little substantial matter and is of a more liquidy constitution), a bit of wakash (or soup), and a handful of eggs as well as pitchers of coffee. Gobbling it down, we found a full hour on our hands before church commenced. although a cold, dreary fog dictated the sky, we made our way over to the market that forms every Sunday in San Migueal. We found nothing of interst, however, and made our way back to the church.
With a stream of people still steadily trickling in, the worship started. a few items of note here. In this service, there was no real "worship time", it was interspersed between prayers, a speech, and the sermon. Another observation is that the people rarely stand to sing, and are even less likely to clap after a song. Arvid later explained that, for some reason I can't remember, it was not considered the best thing to do.
The brothers and sisters in Christ were very welcoming to us here as well, and honored us many times with their thanks to God that we were here (from what few words I extracted from the K'anjob'al monologues).
Another great opportunity we got was to sing for them. We had prepared three songs last night, and performed them, for which they broke their silent tradition and clapped (Arvid guessed they had figured out it was an okay thing to do in our culture). We did the following songs:
1. Kal Watx' K'ane, Alleluya (a K'anjob'al song to the tune of Battle of the Republic, of which we sang the K'anjob'al chorus, the English verse and chorus, and then the K'anjob'al chorus again).
2. Txojxa swatxil kecab yetoj Dios- this was a chorus we did completely in K'anjob'al, butchering it so badly Arvid told us to do it twice because the people didn't recognize it as K'anjob'al.
3. Lord, Prepare Me- last night, we had a singing festival in Kris-Ann's room led mostly by Kris-Ann. When she and Abby did a harmony on this song, we all fell in love with it because the voices complimented each other so well. So, with Kris-Ann and Abby leading, some of us took melody and others harmony and we sang away.
Another neat custom they have is paying money to God for birthdays. Depending on how old you were, you would give a certain amount. Teh idea appealed to me, however, since God has granted us each year of life and it is only appropriate that we return thanks.
It didn't take long for me to get completely lost and bored during the K'anjob'al/Spanish sermon. The reason I say Spanish is because the pastor would switch into it at critical points in the sermon, most likely to ensure that everyone, including us, got as much out of the sermon as possible. But since I didn't speak very much Spanish either, I just ended up reading my Bible and tryng to pick up a few words or phrases out of the speech.
Then it dawned on me. We hadn't been brought to church that morning just to say we had attended- we had been brought to experience the spiritual stagnation of not having God's
Word in your own tongue. If the pastor's sermon had left me bored and uninterested, is this the same reaction we want for the Word of God amongst those who know nothing of Jesus' saving grace? We are left with two choices- translate the Bible or watch the people perish.
After that, we ate and Arvid went over some things for us to think about.
Oh, and we got to see Marie Sabet, Dorcas, and Ana again. God has truly blessed me!
In Christ,
Brittany N. Goodrich
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