sorry to all my peeps out there who have been waiting on pins and needles for an update. i have been out in a remote village called arroyo palenque for the last week and this is my first time back in the city where technology is available. but be patient, the whole year will be a lot like this.
i will attempt to compress and cover an entire week of ministry into one blog. we learned on saturday that our team of 5 would be leaving palenque to take Jesus to the countryside. so monday morning at 7 am we took off from our “home” in palenque and drove an hour through the mountains until we arrived at our small village of arroyo palenque. we are partnered up with a local pastor and essentially compromising with him how to be most effective in the community. no one day has been the same. let me back up for a moment and tell you about the indigenous of arroyo and a little bit about the surrounding countryside outside of palenque. the countryside is filled with some 212 different villages. by in large, these villages dont speak spanish which makes things difficult. there are 5 different dialects in the villages with the most common one being a dialect called chol which is spoken by some 150 of the villages. fortunately for us, our pastor speaks a good deal of spanish. these people are mostly mayan descendents and where the catholic religion is not prevalent, ancient mayan religions passed down are still practiced. the catholic “faith” does have a pretty strong influence in our village, but this faith is one that is powerless, passionless, Jesusless and therefore lacking the true power of God to change lives and hearts while making Jesus the spotlight of life.
back to our week. the church we are supporting has 4 services every week including sunday, monday, wednesday and friday. while our group has had a major role in these services, we have also spent time with families in arroyo who are in real need of prayer. what this has consisted of has been primarily families our persons that are physically sick. we believe in the power of the Holy Spirit but during my church life in america i have not dealt with laying hands on sick people and praying for healing. this is important for the family we are staying with as they have witnessed many miracles through the power of the Holy Spirit. we have prayed for people with bodily pains, blind individuals, a woman with some ovary issues and a man that i believe is demon possessed. we have been in intense prayer in this manner for rather long stretches of time and even walked around 4 miles one way to a village to pray for some people. the spiritual heaviness has been hard at times and it makes more difficult to handle when we have little down time to process, grow as a team and rest. we are learning that we have to fight for time as a team to continue the grow as a team. this current pace will be hard for some of us to maintain and we understand that. anyways, i should probably cut this one off and maybe i will start another one for the sake of brevity.
