Sunday, June 26, 2011

Passing of the Microphone

Viña Anonos is pleased to host once again the New Life Church of Columbus, Ohio!! We have a full team who arrived on Saturday to bless the community. They came fully prepared to work and serve with the heart and mind of Christ...and with them came over 600 pounds of items for our thrift store!! What a blessing!! Ana Laura and I were also BLOWN AWAY by their generosity with items for the Princess Club!! We definitely experienced the generosity of our King of Kings through the team!!!!

One of the neat things about hosting teams is seeing the community again through fresh eyes. No matter where you live, after a while we all experience ruts in our daily living. When teams come, I am reminded about all the little things that I´ve become ¨accustomed¨ to in just a few months...like not being able to flush my toilet paper down the toilet, seeing very small children play in the streets unattended at all hours of the day (and night), seeing people in the streets drunk in the middle of the day, and hearing the egg man announce that he has fresh eggs at 6 in the morning. I think I´ve even gotten used to hearing the dogs in the streets...all night long...

Another wonderful part of having teams come is experiencing bilingual church. Not many people can say they attend a completely bilingual church. While we sing all our songs in Spanish (well, except for an occasional verse or chorus in English) alll of the messages are bilingual. Usually Rodney preaches in English while someone translates into Spanish (either Federico, Ronny Ruiz, or myself) and typically when teams are present and a Tico preaches in Spanish, the message gets translated into English.

Today was an example of how this process can take on a hilarious spin. We had invited Federico, a local gentleman from the other Viña in Escazú, to preach (in Spanish). After the worship set, we always have a prayer, collect the offering, dismiss the children, have a time of announcements, etc. We have two microphones, one black and one silver. Apparently today whoever spoke in English into the microphone was supposed to use the silver microphone and whoever spoke in Spanish was supposed to use the black microphone. It became a hilarious exchange as Federico translated into Spanish for Rodney´s English, then Federico translated into English for Alejandro´s Spanish  (Alejandro shared a testimony), and then I translated into English for Federico´s Spanish message!!

We are very excited for this coming week of work. I´ll keep you posted as we go along!!

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