I want you to meet Manuel. (Not to be confused with our translator.) To be truthful, I know very little about him, except his name and that he lives in the small village of Cigual which was to be our home for two days of ministry. He doesn’t speak English. In fact, he doesn’t speak at all. The most he can get out is more of an incoherent groaning sound, but is usually followed up by a mostly toothless smile.
Shortly after arriving to Cigual, we were getting ourselves unpacked out of the truck and all of our gear stored up in the church before figuring out our next move for the day. Three of my teammates and our translator left to go figure out food preparations for the day, while the other four of us were left to look after things. Before too long, we noticed this older man slowly making his way to the church. When I say slow, we’re talking that even the tortoise wouldn’t need a head start to win a head to head race with him.
Two of the girls went to him to assist him the rest of the way into the church and into a seat. Having no idea where he came from, it’s possible he could have been walking more than ½ hour to get to the church. After getting him seated, we felt the urge to just pray over him, despite not knowing anything about him. We did and he responded by raising a clenched fist in the air as if to proclaim, “Yes! Yes!” and one of his toothless grins. Candice read him a little bit from Psalms in Spanish, and myself feeling moved in his faith to walk as far as he did to the church considering his current physical state shared Romans 5 in Spanish. This whole time he keeps raising up that fist and smiling.
Candice, Manuel, and Myself sitting outside.
I was captured by his heart. I just sat with him with my hand on his or on his shoulder. I could have sat with him all day and not said another word. Eventually though, we had to move outside with all of the young kids that we’d managed to attract with our presence as the church was cleaned. Manuel seemed to take a little joy in lightly hitting a few of them on the top of their heads and raising his fist if they got to close or were bothering me by going after my hair.
After a little more sitting Candice busted out her notebook and drew a lovely stick figure picture of herself, myself, and Manuel. The expression on his face was golden. With shaky hands he attempted to carefully fold up the picture and put it in his pocket, but needed a little help in doing so. Finally, he must have decided that he’d had enough of the loud/busy children, got himself up, and slowly made his way back to which ever home was his in Cigual.
Like I said, I know next to nothing about him, but in those few special hours that we managed to spend together, he was absolutely an added joy to my day.
Manuel slowly heading home from the church.
