I have been listening to a song lately by Bethel that says "this is what you do, you make me come alive". This week at Rivas I got to experience some awesome experiences.
First, I will tell about my experience on the moto. I had he great luck of being able to ride on the motorcycle with our host Sarah to go to the post office to send a post card. It was so fun! I hadn't seen the center of town before, nor had I ridden in such crazy traffic. I made sure to hold on tight! When a bicycle taxi almost ran into us our host said "estas dormiendo? (Are you sleeping?) haha. After we found the post office, we took in unexpected visit to Maxi Pali, a store kinda like a miniature Walmart. It was the first time I had seen something like it where you could buy groceries of all types and clothes. Most shopping is done around here in the hundreds of neighborhood stores out of people's houses. It was a lot of fun.
Another fun experience was on Sunday; we were told that we would have the morning off and have a church services at 4pm. The fruit basket was upset our hostess told me this morning that church would be in the morning. We had a special treat of peanut butter pancakes and bananas for breakfast, then got our walking shoes on for the half hour to church. We were caught by surprise when we arrived. I think we expected to find a building… we found instead a some houses and a shelter made out of banana leaves for the official church building. The maximum capacity was about 15 adults and 4 kids. The plastic chairs were set out to claim our spot (and some mini ones too). One of the leaders there suggested I get the mini kids chair as a joke. I got a laugh out of it. Once some other people arrived, we had worship with music on someone's computer.
Then God showed up. It was good. His presence was so evident as we worshiped with the sun on our face and the wind in our hair. We were really alive.
The service continued with a couple of English songs from our group, a sermon from our hostess Sarah, and pineapple empanadas sale. It seems like they have sold some kind of food at every church we have been to. Maybe we should sell our cookies at church, haha. We retuned home on a back road with the common smells of animals and burning trash. Oddly enough, I'll probably miss those smells when I am back in the states. Life here (even though we are off the island this week) is different, but the goodness of the people and our God is the same.
My last story moment was zip lining today back on Ometepe. I hope to continue living it up this lay week and a half we have here!
