Using our Voice, Part 1: Sounding Like a Fool and Loving It
Last Saturday we participated in a youth service at Pastor Noe’s church in San Salvador. We’ve been attending his church in town as well as the 'sister' church that we’ve been working at, which is the one located about an hour outside of the city in the beach community of San Diego. Our participation in the youth service was both the best and worst part about the day in my opinion.
Our local contact and friend, Juan Carlos, asked my team of six to come up to the front of the youth service and sing a song in English. We hadn’t really practiced anything and we decided to sing “How He Loves.” To cut to the chase, in all honesty, we were awful. We were not prepared. We didn’t know about 75% of the words. I had a person on one side of me singing different words than the person on the other side of me, which threw me off. Plus, I didn’t know a lot of the words myself. I could barely keep myself from laughing. We hummed quite a bit of it in between the main chorus. Seriously, tomatoes would have been thrown had we been on American Idol or anything else. Our team definitely isn’t gifted with singing. It was a moment of pure humility. A team bonding moment for sure.
And as embarrassing as it was, sounding and looking like fools didn’t bother me that much. We were putting ourselves out there in the name of Jesus, in the name of love. That’s all that mattered. And I’m pretty sure we are going to have many more opportunities to make fools of ourselves like that. I smile and look forward to it.
This is my team, Team All.LOVE branch, hanging out with some of the youth after we sang at the church youth service.
A couple of us dressed up as clowns at the youth service at the sister church in San Diego. I'm the one in the costume that actually looks like a pirate costume (red pants, striped shirt, and a black Mickey Mouse vest!). You can see the church grounds in the background. This is were we did our manual labor the first two weeks we were here in the country. Our work at that church culminated with the inauguration celebration last Sunday. See my next blog for Part 2.
