Disclaimer: this blog is a bit long (in case you didn’t notice) and holds exactly zero interesting stories. please read and comment anyways. i had fun writing it. thanks.
Superbowl Sunday. The All-American holiday of watching football and scandalous halftime shows, drinking beer and eating hot wings, and officially undoing all of the New Years resolutions for healthier bodies that you spent January obtaining. By 10pm most Americans have consumed some 4,000 calories of fat, sugar, and alcohol, and are passionately arguing over which of the two teams (neither of which most people cared about in the least before this day) played better.
Superbowl Sunday dawned in El Salvador bright, sunny, and plenty hot. As with most of the things we do on this crazy thing we call the World Race, we had only a vague idea of what to expect heading into the day, but I personally was ready to take on this unusual Superbowl Sunday with excitement and gusto.
Turned out not a lot of gusto was needed.
We found out late Saturday that the church we are working with spends the first Sunday of every month fasting, worshipping, and praying for the month ahead. Some vague ideas were communicated about when and how long exactly the fasting would take place, as well as what the church services would look like. But as usual, we didn’t REALLY know what to expect….which is always fine with me, I find it exciting.
So we rolled up to church the usual 20 minutes late and participated in the regular service from 9am-11am. Then…moment of truth: what do we do the rest of the day?
Answer: We spend the entire day, from 9am-6pm, partaking in a service held for those involved in the church.
Now, I would love to tell you at this point that it was a day of intense prayer and worship and earth-shattering revelations from God for me. But let me let you in on a little secret: when all of the praying, preaching, and worshipping is in a language you don’t speak, you kind of tap out on your ability to focus by about hour 3.
By noon, I was imagining what this day looked like back in North Carolina for my friends and family. Most unfortunately, Superbowl Sunday involves a lot of eating delicious food, so my stomach was growling increasingly louder as I imagined pizza, wings, chips and various dips, brownies, and the customary occasional raw vegetable drowning in ranch.
I spent some time trying to figure out the arrangement of this service. It appeared to be a bit of a pulpit free-for-all, where anyone could pray or preach if they so took a notion…but it may have been very specifically planned (I sure wouldn’t know). At one point, we were asked to go ahead and go on up there and share what we had prepared.
Share what we had prepared!? We hadn’t prepared anything! We had no idea this was going to happen! But such is life on the WR, so a couple of my team mates sang a song and did some good preachin’ and we called it a day on our team sharing.
Around 1:30, my head was pounding from trying to stay awake and from being void of calories or caffeine, both of which I have usually had in abundance by this point in the day. I popped a couple of aspirin, and decided to settle in to study the book of Genesis a bit. I put my Bible in my lap and set out to color-code underline both the Word and the commentary in my (super awesome) ESV study Bible.
With my elbows on my knees to look down at my Bible, I of course managed to doze off for about the 3rd time that day. When my elbow slid off my knee, I narrowly missed slamming my face straight into the story of Cain and Abel. I jerked awake and tried to subtly wipe the drool off of my face and hoped that the pastor, who sat directly across from me on stage, hadn’t noticed. I would never want to disrespect our church or pastor in any way, but combine caffeine withdrawal with sitting in the same spot for a 9 hour service (none of which I can comprehend in the slightest), and I am bound to struggle here and there, right!?!?
Get it together, Bethany! You are fasting and spending time in the presence of God for Pete’s sake! So I managed to spend some time focusing in prayer and asking God to reveal Himself to me, and I am confident that, despite my weak flesh and wandering mind, He did some work. He is really capable and faithful like that.
Around 3pm, I had done some more good prayin’, and also counted the number of ceiling tiles, chairs in the congregation, and letters in the church’s mission and vision statement (176, 105, and 128, respectively, if you were interested). Caitlin and I managed to sneak out of the church to go to the bathroom next door, and it occurred to me to pray against getting a blood clot from sitting in one place all day. Forget airplanes, we need blood thinners for church services. Next time remind me to pack some Lovenox.
I read a bit of “Things I wish I had known before I got married” because Becki handed me her Kindle and it was pulled up. So I spent a while learning how to make sure the toilets get scrubbed if I ever get married, and also how to avoid storming out of the house into a rainstorm in the middle of fighting with my husband. Thank you Gary Chapman (and you too, Karolyn, for letting your husband air some dirty laundry for the sake of my future marriage).
I felt a little bit better that all of my team mates had also caved at this point and were reading books too. We all spent some portion of this service trying to figure out if there was any way to take a nap under the ruse of intense Bible-in-lap reading. Now, don’t judge or look down on Team Tharros for this; we happily stood (albeit a bit light-headedly) and prayed and sang whenever we were able to decipher that that was what was happening. But when was the last time you sat in a chair without moving for 9 straight hours, void of any calories or caffeine, with intense Spanish booming in your ears, and tried to focus on….well, anything?
But through it all, there is one thing I concluded. This church and these people have a level of devotion to our Lord that most of us in America can barely comprehend. When these people pray, it is not uncommon for them to be moved to tears over their love for Christ. When they preach, it is not with an eye on the clock for when exactly they need to finish, but it is delivered from the heart and received by open hands. And imagine if your pastor told you that the first Sunday of every month you would be fasting until about 7pm and sitting in a day-long service of prayer and worship. How willingly would you take that on?
I learned a lot about my need to ask God to improve my willingness to lose myself in my efforts to truly cry out to Him and worship Him and call on Him to make things happen. Never again will I glance at my watch when the preacher has gone over by a minute or two and I have lunch plans.
Of course God kept us little gringos in mind, and He worked a little miracle at the end of the day. We explained to the pastor that the Superbowl is pretty much an American holiday, and we talked him into taking us to a Chili’s a couple of towns over! He had never been, and we got to eat greasy food and watch the second half of the Superbowl!
We have only 4 more days here in El Salvador, and we are so sad to leave these people. They have been so kind and gracious towards us, and we have learned so much from them about the meaning of humble servanthood. Despite my poor focus in the service, they will always stay in my heart as a people that know how to commit themselves to the Lord in huge ways.
