A week of Contrasts

It has been a week since I blogged last, and I have experienced so much that I don’t know what to actually write about!  This week we spent in one of the larger cities in Indonesia, which had its perks.  Internet availability has been one. Another was the huge shopping mall, with a “hypermarket” that carries all kinds of good things like Tim Tams (we are close enough to Australia I should have guessed) and frosted flakes.  They also have an A&W and McDonalds.  For 25 euro cents I can get a McD’s cone.  That is pretty amazing!   But I digress.  I’ll talk about food in the next post!  So during this week we have experienced some amazing things.  God has done some things that definitely show his love and power.  Our first day of ministry here, Alex actually got really sick.  I have my suspicions to why, but the testimony is that we prayed for him in the morning when he looked like a zombie and by supper he was himself again. Everything we did that first day, we thought was going to be super hard.  Talking to street youth. Teaching English to kids.  Sharing at a cell group.  But God showed up every time.  Every one ended up blessing us more than we felt we blessed them.  I think that God wanted to build our confidence. We absolutely loved the cell group, and they loved us.  We had an amazing time of worship together, and they knew enough English to allow us to carry on a conversation without an interpreter, which is such a blessing since six of us only having one interpreter can make things unnatural.  The rest of the week wasn’t such a walk in the park, but it was really good. We had some late night ministry time, and another cell group meeting. We fed some of the homeless/poor/street community with a pastor, which was a really good experience to see the not so nice part of the society.  And we prayed for healing for a couple people one night too. We had an amazing experience praying for healing for a somewhat young mother with cancer and an older lady with kidney failure.  To see what God is wanting to do and is doing and speaking it out in faith… I for one was changed by the experience. 

But that was only half of our week.  For the weekend, we went from our fairly industrialized and modern city to a mountain village. And although they have power, and running water… I was not prepared.  This is the only home I’ve been in with a dirt floor in the kitchen.  And the bed was made of wooden slats, with spaces between them.  And the mattress was very thin.  I needed to get over the moths and geckos in the bathroom, and the very big (hand size) spiders outside.  But those are the negatives.  Once you get over that, you realize that this is the most amazing experience. I was in the jungle.  There was no doubting that! Banana trees and palm trees and bamboo… I actually couldn’t take it all in.  I didn’t realize it was bamboo outside the window until the last day.  We met the most amazing kids.  We prayed for healing for multiple people in the village, and we asked the kids to pray with us.  And as we prayed for the first man, we asked a 12 year old boy that we had grown to love if he would pray.  And as he was praying, God really touched him.  It was so clear to me as I watched that God has a call on his life, and wants to call out this boy for great things.  And every person that we prayed for had some experience of God, and most if not all had improvement in their conditions. It was really encouraging to see God healing people right there in front of us. We spoke at four services over the weekend, all taking turns.  And it was really cool to see how God even uses us to speak to each other. Often I was taking notes from the “sermons” that they had prepared.  As we were at one church it began to rain (rain in the mountain means ‘flash flood’), and after the service ended we had to run to save our sandals from washing away (you leave your footwear outside a building when you enter, except on Sunday at church, which I haven’t figured out yet).   And the second service we attended on Sunday was at a church that had outgrown its building.  We sat on the patio, under a blue plastic roof, sweltering during the two plus hour service. Thankfully they gave us refreshments (more about that when I talk about food in my next post!)

So now we are back in the big city for a couple more days, before our leader Steve and Ben, his son leave to go home for Christmas. Then it will be “just the four of us” for a week and a half until our other leaders come.  Christmas in 20 degrees. I can’t comprehend that yet…