Alabare!

Today was our first chance to visit the Sunday morning service at the Iglesia de Cristo in Mateo.  Mateo is a small community a few miles outside Tegucigalpa.  


We left our house early and gave ourselves plenty of time to get lost, and we wasted little time in doing so.  We did, however, still manage to arrive just a few minutes before the scheduled start time of 9:30.  At about 9:25, the 250, or so, metal folding chairs were alarmingly empty.  I was just about to sprawl out and recline onto several of the chairs adjacent to mine, when two school busses arrived, each carrying at least twice the amount of people who could be comfortably seated on such a vehicle and packed the church so that more chairs had to be set up. 


We sang a lot of songs, and this was obviously a group of people that loves to sing and sing loud.  It was awesome.  It was sincerely refreshing to me personally to hear people sing, whose number one priority was to put their heart and soul into singing and praising God, not getting hung up on the intricate nuances of four-part harmony.  Don't get me wrong--they sounded beautiful, but what was most beautiful is the way they just let loose and sang.


I wish I could say that I understood most of the sermon, but the truth is that I just got bits and pieces ("mas despacio, por favor").  But what I did understand was really amazing.  The preacher, Leopoldo, spoke about Noah and the covenant that God made to never destroy the earth with water again, putting a rainbow in the sky as a symbol of that promise.  What made this especially moving is that Honduras and much of Central America have experienced terrible flooding and mudslides recently.  At the end of the sermon, Leopoldo prayed for those who had lost crops and even homes due to all the rain--this including people in the audience.  What, for most of my life, had always been a cute little story about a guy on a boat with a bunch of animals seeing a rainbow (or was it a double rainbow?) was now, to these people, a comforting promise that God, even in terrible circumstances, was there and wouldn't abandon them.  


bd