Saturday Post -- 12/12/15

Craig's train-of-thought: Revelation = scary horses = classic Guinness commercial!

Like the grass on Centre Court, this week's missive is necessarily short, owing to very Trinidad-like circumstances. Firstly, we got an invitation late last night to a graduation ceremony taking place all this morning (see here and here for past entries on December's annual applause-a-thon). Secondly, I was intending to get up earlier to write a post of more substance, and I did precisely that, only to discover a not insignificant, and very urgent, termite problem. 

We went out for some food last night, and Amanda commented on how busy we've been this week and how that, for once, that has felt like a real provision. Because looming over us this whole time has been Monday, 4pm: the hearing where a decision will be made on the child we wish to foster, then adopt. Aside from a couple of our usual visits to the orphanage where said child resides, it's been good to be distracted.

And Christmas has been a common factor in that. As well as the usual extra shifts with the musicians in the church, I've been preparing a sermon based on Revelation 12:1-6. Revelation is a little outside my comfort zone, so the preparation was heavier than usual. I'd been keen to present the text for a while, however, as it offers, in a sense, a cosmic perspective on what was going on down in Bethlehem. In other words, it's a Christmas passage but not as we know it, Jim, while touching on the important theme of spiritual warfare, and how there is so much more going on behind the everyday trials and tribulations we face. It also gives me an opportunity (much anticipated!) to critique the phenomenon of Revelation in his culture. Pretty much anyone here -- churchgoer or not -- could tell you something about Revelation, a book that people in Trinidad get generally pretty worked up about -- probably about 90% of the questions I'm asked by youth about the Bible stem from Revelation, and you'll even have TV news items about it (!). Yet few know how to read it.

Meanwhile, our dining room table has somehow disappeared as, in between her usual HR duties at Fundación Totaí, Amanda has spent any spare moment preparing various arts and crafts for upcoming Christmas events, specifically FT's end-of-year dinner on the 21st, and the Christmas Eve service. So if you need a Beaver-from-Narnia mask, you know who to ask.

Well, the shops are opening, I desperately need to pick up an anti-termite spray, and a friend is about to graduate. To the prayer points.

Prayer

• Monday, 4pm. Or, if you want to be more specific, 3pm EST, 8pm GMT. We would greatly value your prayers for this. We will endeavour to relay any news as soon as we can (i.e., before next weekend).
• For Craig's sermon tomorrow morning.

Praise

• We've both had our usual diet of one-on-one discipleship appointments this week and have been encouraged by these times, for various reasons. Give thanks for the growth in these individuals.
• For a busy, productive and highly distracting week!

¡Que Dios les bendiga!

Craig & Amanda

Saturday Post -- 07/12/13

Bachelor boys Arnold...

...and Paulo.

It’s high school graduation season in Trinidad and, so far, we’ve been invited to three of them, for various teenagers in the youth group, as well as a lunch on Wednesday for the son of some old family friends. So you could certainly say that the week has been a qualified success. Did you see what I did there?

With so many other things to attend to over the past few weeks, we hadn’t really factored in the usual spate of certificate-bestowal, and so we’re increasingly glad for the extra time that finishing at FT a week ago has afforded us over the last seven days. We have been rattling through a fairly extensive to-do list, with Amanda looking to clear the laundry backlog, I looking to clear out our cupboards, and both of us attending to the presentation we’ll be giving, God-willing, from January onwards – we were keen not to have that hanging over us during the Christmas holidays. In the meantime, I’ve been getting my first emails from Cornhill Scotland indicating the arrangements for the new term in January. It’s starting to feel very real now.

A fair few pictures which will be included in our presentation were taken on Sunday, which was another really encouraging day for us as a church. As mentioned last week, a course called ‘The Culture of Blessing’ was organised and overseen by a couple in the church in the afternoon. Between the morning services and the afternoon event, we had a big lunch together. And the course itself was of great benefit to us all. It focused particularly on the huge impact, for better or worse, that our words can make. It was a great message for the church to hear, in a culture where people can be a little less restrained with the tongue than back home. Inevitably, the last exercise required us to act on what we’d been learning, so I ended up having to telling a chap how much I loved him and listing all the things that were so great about him. At first, the two of us could hardly have been more petrified if we’d been forced at gunpoint to attend an X Factor finalists concert. But we got there in the end – and some kind of wonderful it was, too.

Sunday capped off another busy weekend at church, which on Saturday included the end-of-year party for the Bible Explorers’ Club. However, Amanda always prefers to go that little bit further, and so on Wednesday evening she took her teenage girls’ class out for a meal. Indeed, our evenings have more or less disappeared as we aim to spend a last few hours of quality time with as many people as possible. Last night we were out with our Bible study companions Carlos & Carla, tonight my bandmates have invited themselves over after youth group for some pizza (in fairness, they’re bringing the pizza) and tomorrow we’re planning on a meal with our fellow youth leaders. From Monday onwards, we’ll doubtless have to tell people to take the musicians’ approach if they want to see us, as we have a lot of packing to do.

One item we were delighted to stroke off the to-do list was the installation of the church’s new air conditioners, supplied by LAM Canada, which had been purchased about a month ago, yet had lain dormant in the church for nearly two weeks since their delivery. Wednesday afternoon proved a useful ‘test event’ (Brazilian football tournament organisers, take note) in the shape of the end-of-year party for the Community classes. 40 screaming, kinetic kids proved no match for our new walk-in freezer. Attending church will never have been such a refreshing experience.

Prayer

• Right. Things are now, as one might put it, very much 'on'. We have six days to organise our house, get round all the people we need to see, and pack our possessions into four suitcases. Pray for good progress and for patience with one another – these things can get a little stressful!
• On Thursday, we begin our long trip to Scotland with a bus trip to Santa Cruz, whence we hope to post one final entry on this here blog (our flights to Brazil, and then the UK, are on Sunday and Monday, respectively). Pray for safety on the road.

Praise

• Amidst the busyness of all these graduations, end-of-year events and special times at church, we’ve had really tangible reminders over the last week of the special relationship we have with our ‘faith family’, if you like. Life here can be pretty challenging at times, but the closer we get to furlough, the sadder we feel about saying goodbye to so many dear friends for a year. And that’s a happy problem, in our book. 
• Give thanks, too, for the resolution of the air conditioner situation. We hope these will be a great help to the church, where Sundays can at times be oppressively hot. Pray too that the more pleasant conditions will encourage more people to come along and be part of our community in Christ.

¡Que Dios les bendiga!

Craig & Amanda

Saturday Post -- 15/12/12

See 'pros'.

Around the world, countries tend to have their own natural starting guns where it's OK to acknowledge that Christmas is nearly upon us and to begin preparations forthwith. The US, for example, have Thanksgiving. In the UK, we have July.

Here in Bolivia, it's Christmas, Jim, but not as we know it. This, one must remember, is a culture where religious festivals are liberally laced throughout the year like so much tinsel on a tree (and are religiously accompanied by sacrilegious quantities of beer). Christmas is just another such holiday and was treated as such for many years. With the benefit of a decade's absence between my two stints here, however, it's clear that Christmas is slowly but surely emerging from the pack as a holiday of rare note. Shops are now decked out in mid-November, stalls for fake trees and decorations are scattered throughout the town centre, an elaborate Nativity scene sits in the middle of the main plaza. Throw in a snow machine and Morecambe & Wise repeats and you'd have yourself a merry little white person's Christmas.

This wouldn't be Bolivia, however, if things weren't a little stop-start, and such is the buildup to Christmas here, the prime obstacle being the small matter of high school graduations. A natural upshot of our involvement in youth ministry is that we are invited to a handful of these every year, and they all take place in early- to mid-December. 

A high-school graduation is a bit like a wedding here. You have your religious ceremony (usually a mass) during which whole classrooms of students receive the relevant paperwork. Friends and family obediently sit quietly through the ceremony with one eye trained squarely on the proceeding merriment in the shape of the graduation meal and attendant festivities, which take place that evening or at some point later in the week.

These ceremonies usually take place in the morning, so with our work commitments, we tend to miss most of these (though Amanda was able to make a brief appearance during the week). But, knowing just how much it means to the youth -- and, boy, do their faces light up when they see us -- we do our best to get to the receptions. 

These have their pros and cons. First of all, an invitation to such bunfights is often accompanied by a crucial elevation in status. We are often approached beforehand to find out if we might be interested in 'sponsoring' an element of the party, say, the table decorations or the customary ring for the graduate. We're all too happy to help in this regard. But the best part is the title which goes along with such a deed: padrinos. This, technically speaking, is a very translation of 'sponsor'. Happily, however, this same work also means 'godparents'. Yes, folks, for one night, and one night only, I am The Godfather. Cue haunting trumpet solo!

Furthermore, such opportunities to doll oneself up are all too rare in this climate, and so we enjoy the chance to don some of our best clobber and take rare photographs of us wearing Nice Clothes, one of which will almost certainly find itself wedged into our next prayer update.

Then there's the dancing. And here, the upsides and downsides reach a point of convergence. Amanda loves nothing more than to strut her stuff on the floor. As for me, I tend to require a little Dutch courage to even consider such a notion, not least here, where a sense of rhythm is seemingly genetic. This option being unavailable (as a rule, we don't consume alcohol outside the home to protect our witness) I sit and pretend to hear what the person next to me is saying. This, too, has its difficulties as, despite usually being gathered in someone's front room, the music is by now reaching volume levels required of rock festivals. 

You may remember such reflections a while back on birthday parties and, alas, the serving of food follows a similar timetable, i.e., a copious meal (which it's considered bad form to refuse) served at some point between midnight and 1am. Given that our main meal of the day is at lunchtime and our bedtime these days is no later than around 10.30pm, this is hardly my definition of fun.

Nonetheless, we attend, and will continue to do so, because of what it means to the many young people we work with to see us there supporting them. And when I'm sat there, half-asleep, half-deaf, wondering what exactly I did to deserve such a fate, I'm reminded that Jesus himself must have frequented a lot of social situations he didn't much fancy either. 

Well, we have a mammoth day of wall-to-wall work/engagements ahead (including, yes, a graduation party, mercifully scheduled for lunchtime) so I'll leave you with some prayer points.

Prayer

• We're now very much entering the final furlong in preparations for the Christmas service on the 23rd. Today we have our first run-through of the programme, followed by a full dress rehearsal next week. Pray for energy and patience, particularly for Amanda, who is very much at the forefront of the logistics, and who will on the evening of the 23rd be required to dive headlong into Christmas lunch preparation (we're planning a post-Christmas break, by the way).
• For progress on the house (where the wall tiling is now completed and the floor tiles are now being laid) and, as last week, the emergence of a buyer for the land we now no longer require. However, we're probably looking to January now for the move.
• For Amanda's recovery from a recent sinus infection.

Praise

• For the opportunity to support so many of our young people these past couple of weeks.

¡Que dios les bendiga!

Craig & Amanda

Update
Completely forgot to mention a pretty big piece of news this week, that Amanda has been chosen to serve on FT's board. Practically, it means she sits in on the daily morning meetings and is at the forefront of the decision-making process. Pray for wisdom for Amanda as she embarks on this exciting new chapter.