Trip Story #3: Local Church
I arrived in the second city of my two-week, two-city tour (I'm like a rock star) on Saturday evening. After hanging out with a great family there for a while, I went home with CS to spend the week.
Sunday morning, it was time to go to church. In my city, church consists of the team getting together and doing a house church. For CS, though, church is getting together with a group of locals downtown for a full-fledged local church service.
Just getting there was quite a trip. CS and I headed to a bus stop and were waiting for a bus to come when a guy and his wife pull up on a motorcycle and nod to CS. CS nods to me and we head over to the hog. Fortunately, there was a sidecar attached, or we'd have had to go 4 on the bike itself. We piled in to the sidecar and got a first-rate tour of the city on a beautiful sunny day. And yes, that was my first time in a sidecar...
We pulled up to the building and headed in. Inside there were a dozen people or so with Bibles in their hands talking with others about God, the gospel, and truth. To really get how big that was for me, remember that I've been here the last 6 months and haven't seen any body of local believers at all. I think I've seen 5 total local believers, all isolated. To see a group come together and share truth with each other was awesome.
After a while of talking (or in my case trying to talk) we all headed in to another room and sang songs and heard a sermon, all in the local language. It was good, I could understand what some of the songs were saying, but most of the time I was just singing along none the wiser. The speaker spoke a lot about faith, but I really don't know the specifics. It's hard to understand what a guy is saying when you only understand 2 or 3 words of every sentence.
As we left, I felt like I had seen a small part of what we're working for here. That's why we're here, after all, to see local believers join together and worship God and spread the news.
Beautiful! Now you have a glimpse of what Rev 7:9-12 is all about! Enjoy!
Posted by
Polarbear |
5:20 PM