Thank You

September 20th 2009 11:00pm

Today was a new day, and I felt refreshed in the affirmation of the hope that I ended my last post in. I was constantly being sent messages today from various friends and family expressing their love and prayers for me. It has helped more than you know.

Around 9:00, Freddy called to say that he was not going to be picking me up for church. He had been mountain biking this morning with Sedoc, and his mother was going to pick me up instead. I headed downstairs and jumped into Freddy's mom's car. Freddy's sister, and his sister's friend Kelly were also in the car. The four of us rode to downtown to church, where we were among the first people to arrive.

We began the Sunday School with the four of us, but the class again expanded to about 15 members by the end of the class. It is hard for me to participate in the class, but I am doing a fairly good job at keeping up with what is going on. As far as Sunday School classes go, it is a pretty standard young adult class. The only thing that I don't like about it really is that it is very reaffirming of existing notions of faith. There is a lot of agreement when ideas are presented, and nothing is really discussed. Everyone seems to all be on the exact same page, which borderline terrifies me.

After the class, we headed out to the sanctuary for the service. Today's service was not as short as I was hoping. There was a guest preacher, who brought a slide show and ended up being more of a guest lecturer. He talked for over an hour on God's justice. Over an hour about how God showed God's rage against the Egyptians in Exodus. Over an hour on how God showed God's rage against God's own people and sent them into exile. These 2,600 + year old stories are clearly parallels to the situation in Honduras currently. It is all about God's justice.

It was a hard service to sit through.

After drawing itself out with an additional ten minute long prayer which paraphrased the sermon, the service finally ended around 1:00pm. My stomach was rumbling with hunger. But I didn't get to eat quite yet. The young adult group needed to practice dances for the "Typical Honduran Night" coming up this Saturday.

The dances looked funny, and they asked me to fill in for one of the absent performers today. It was a fun dance to do, and it reminded me of some of the dances that we did in Chile. I was fortunate to have some of that experience so that I didn't look even more foolish than I already did.

We finally left the church by 2:00, but Freddy and I had to drop off a girl from the youth group before heading over to join Freddy's mom, sister, and sisters friend for lunch. I didn't get to eat until 2:30, which when I type it out, sounds very whiney. Sorry.

We had pupusas for lunch, and when I sat down to eat, I looked around the table, and a voice in my head went, "Ohhh. Well... that is not how I've been doing that." I have not been eating pupusas correctly at all. Not even close. They definitely are not the finger food that I thought they were.

I was dropped back off to my apartment around 3:30, and spent the afternoon working on Spanish, reading the Old Man and the Sea, and watching the Steelers lose. I think I will be able to get the Bengals game here next week, but it was good to see that they won. The Reds won too today. Side note: The Cincinnati Reds are also brought up in The Old Man and the Sea.

I decided to make chicken parmesean for dinner, I followed the recipe that my mother sent me online, and I'm not going to lie...it was really good. I dont know if it has to do with the ingredients that I have available to me here, but it was very delicious. I ate my dinner and watched the Emmy's.

Stephanie Pence sent me a text message telling me to get on to skype, and we chatted for a while though neither of us had our cameras or microphones on or running. It was nice to type back and forth with her for a while though.

After talking with Stephanie, I cleaned up my dishes, and studied my Spanish some more. I continued getting messages of support, even within the last half hour, and have been uplifted by every single one of them. Today was a fresh day.

Thank you.