01/04/2011 (posted 05/04/2011)
Had such a great sleep. I had loads of dreams which always means that I slept deeply, and I woke up feeling lovely and refreshed.
It´s our last day of outreach - tomorrow at 7am we walk back to the place where we got dropped off and are taken back to Volcan.
Breakfast was fried vegetables which were nice as, true to Panamanian style, loads of salt had been added and they were fried in a bucket of oil.
We were told to prepare a kids programme for 8am but no-one turned up in the end - the Pastor didn´t seem too surprised. It was a shame but we did door-to-door evangelism instead.
Apparently a lot of the local families attend a different church called La Paz (The Peace) which disagree with the church we´re based at on the issue of speaking in tongues. We met a few of their congregation and had some good chats so hopefully one day both churches will put this petty dispute aside.
We walked door-to-door for a couple of hours and I felt tired and weak the whole time. I don´t think I drank enough water.
I also felt quite uneasy that at times, people seem to accept Christ so quickly and it´s almost too good to be true. I feel that at times, people in our team have been putting words in their mouths and I´m not comfortable with that.
At the end of the day, God knows these peoples hearts and He´s in control so I´ll leave it there.
Lunch was spaghetti and spam which was very welcome by the time it arrived.
We then went to the river in the middle of the afternoon and swam a bit and sunbathed a bit. I´m trying to get a tan on my stomach and upper arms because only my lower arms are tanned at the moment and it looks stupid.
The afternoon was free so we lolled about in the heat, napping and wasting time.
The evening was very busy and very enjoyable. We did our usual service in which I played Jesus in the Jailhouse drama. I enjoyed it and loved the idea of Jesus wearing my black slimfit chinos.
We then finished our five and a half weeks of outreach with an all-night prayer event. By all night, we mean 10pm-2am.
We led the first two hours and had four stations with different topics to pray for - spiritual growth, persecuted Christians around the world, thanks giving and the community of Maj Agua (where we are). Everyone drifted between each station as they pleased and it was a great, chilled atmosphere. I also had a lengthy twiddle on someone´s guitar.
When our hour finished, we had loads of sugary coffee to keep us going. I drank so much I felt sick but was absoultely buzzing.
The Pastor the led two straight hours of singing worship which was really vibrant and just totally focussed on God.
By the time it finished we were all tired but devoting such a long period of prayer and worship was really awesome, especially under the twinkling starry night. We said our farewells to the people and I gave a shirt and pair of 3/4 length shorts to Adriano, the guy who gave me his bag earlier in the week. Both are particularly unflattering to my figure and the thought of him wearing them around the Panamanian mounatins is just so cool.
This has been a short week and quite uneventful. Our night services have been nice and short, just 45 minutes, and we´ve had plenty of free time. Unfortunately we couldn´t finish the benches as they couldn´t get hold of any nails that were long enough. It´s a shame to leave on such an uneventful week as in previous weeks, the Pastors have really utilised having eight missionaries and seemed so excited to have us whereas this week they´ve seemed short of ideas of things for us to do.
However it´s arguable that we´re all so tired and ready to finish that we couldn´t have managed much more.
We´re leaving at 7am tomorrow and it´s now 2:30am so I´m going to get some sleep.
JG
No comments:
Post a Comment