Central America Revisited – Day Six

For two years now I have had teachers that were frustrated with the church. Both of them had a deep faith, but the practices they encountered within the life of the church made them not want to participate. I am so grateful to be able to have these conversations. It is not often at home that I get to have lengthy conversations with persons outside of the church. The majority of my time is spent trying to meet the needs of the members. This experience reminds me that there are more people outside of the church than are within the active congregation and there are reasons why people are so disillusioned with the church.

Today I spent almost an hour discussing the practices of Christians with my teacher. He was obviously frustrated with friends and family that would act as though attending a worship service covered all of their misconduct throughout the week. He shared frustration with abusing our bodies with alcohol and engaging in sexual promiscuity, and then having people get upset with him when he would call attention to the behavior. He shared many things, even something as minor as a preacher that lived in the same building with him that would always have prayer meetings and other church functions in his apartment and yet he wouldn’t demonstrate even the simplest courtesy of not blocking him in his parking space. Even after speaking with the pastor several times, the pastor continued to park his car in a way that would prevent him from getting out of the driveway. My teacher felt that the pastor may have preached about loving his neighbor, but his actions demonstrated something far different. I can’t help but think how often my actions are observed by others and how many times my actions may have caused someone to have a negative view of the church. I tried to share with my teacher that our responsibility is to live out the love of God as revealed through Jesus Christ regardless of how others receive what we share and in spite of the fact that we will always come up short in our witness. The best we can do is to persevere and leave the rest to God.

Following a little more conjugation work, we walked around Parque Central because my back was bothering me sitting at the desk for such a long time. It is nice engaging in conversation and using that as a tool for learning another language. My teacher is very encouraging and very complimentary. It certainly makes me want to try a little harder. Fortunately for me he has decided that I need to practice using the language more now than sitting and conjugating verbs.

After lunch, we walked over to the chocolate factory for what I thought was going to be a tour. It turned out that we watched a video on the history of chocolate and then had samples – chocolate fondue, chocolate on a sherbert type of ice cream, and finally, hot chocolate. It was good, but not what I expected. When we returned to the school, we finally met for a team meeting. This was the first time we have had everybody together since our first night here in Guatemala. It was good to hear feedback on the experience. People really seem to be enjoying their time with their families and I think everyone is pleased with their teachers. The only comment of concern was that some felt we needed to be here longer.

Dinner tonight was great. Fried egg on toasted bread and refried beans. The conversation returned to normal – the family was talking so fast that neither Robert nor I could keep up with it. It’s hard to believe that we only have two more days here in Xela. Tomorrow should be interesting in that we will visit the Methodist Medical Clinic. I am looking forward to sharing time with the folks there. Well, I have put it off long enough – time to go write my essay for class tomorrow. I asked my teacher if I could write it in English – he smiled but I don’t think he would find it amusing if I actually did! Oh well, I may have to do it in English anyway!