The following is a narrative of one of our evenings. Most of it is typical to each evening, but we were a little giddy and there were some things that were abnormal or took us by surprise this time.
One evening, we went to a village church as usual. Mark, our squad leader, usually comes with our team, but he didn’t come this time. We drove out pretty far from our base, ending up in a small village. Our pastor ushered us into chairs to relax after the long journey and to take a sip of water (it is customary for the hosts of visitors to offer chairs and water because visitors used to walk long distances). A lot of children soon gathered in front of us. At first, they stood a few meters away, but then they came close and became the touchiest group we’ve experienced. We played the guitar to entertain them, counted in English and the local language, and played hand clapping games. Some of them spoke a useful amount of English, but most only knew a few words. They started talking about a “star” and wanted to take us to it. I got out of my chair to go, but stopped to switch lenses on my camera. I switched them and picked up my camera to find I didn’t tighten the lens down, so it fell off and bounced down from the chair to the ground. That was definitely stressful, but it seems to be fine. The children led us down the street at which point it was dark, to a patio-like structure with a giant Christmas star leaning up against the columns. The children had us take pictures of them in front of the star, followed by a bunch of them asking for selfies together. After that, we went back to our chairs at the house and ate. Usually we eat dinner after church, but this time, we ate it before. Then our pastor told us to sit in the auto for a while until church was ready for us to go in. We didn’t understand what he meant by the church needing to be “ready”, but we got into the auto. We sat in the dark in the auto, talking about a whole bunch of things. Our pastor fell asleep, so we don’t know how long we actually were supposed to wait, but we woke him up 40 minutes later and proceeded to enter church at 8:45 pm. We sat down, and as Casey got in his chair, a spider fell on him. We were used to spiders in the churches, but this one had an abnormally large population, which we observed throughout the service. We had a bit shorter service since it was late. We didn’t do our own worship instead of the usual 2 songs, but we gave the usual 2 testimonies (short witnesses) and delivered a shorter message. Afterward, to our surprise, the village pastor brought out a cake and gave everyone a candle. We realized it was a Christmas celebration. The pastor prayed as we held our lit candles high. Then we were motioned to come to the cake, where the pastor hand fed each of a us a small piece. We sat back down as the pastor said a few more words. We had been whispering to each other about the spiders, of which I estimated to be over 1000 in the church. Audrey counted 16 in front of her hanging from a wooden table, and I had to adamantly convince her not to burn them with her candle. Soon after that, the service ended, we prayed for each person in the church individually, and then we left. It had been another good night of pouring into people, along with some oddities to make it more interesting.
I hope you enjoyed the story!
