Tuesday, November 22, 2011

I set my alarm for 6, and set my coat and glasses out, and then failed to get up. Ah, the struggle every single time.

We ate breakfast and had devotions, and what the other girls shared was really good. I shared Psalm 45:10-11. “Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear; forget also thine own people, and thy father’s house. So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty: for he is thy Lord; and worship thou him.” I explained it was one of the passages God has used to call me to missions. It was just a short contribution from each person.

D brought the Bible A had given her, but didn’t share anything. No one said anything about it. They know she barely speaks Spanish and doesn’t really read it, so they allowed it to pass without incident.

We got in the vans to go to church. I was assigned to the kitchen with M and D, and when we got there, D pulled me aside into the bathroom.

“Rebekah,” she whispered, “I Catholic.”

I could see there was some kind of deeper suffering going on than what met the eye/ear, so I merely listened sympathetically.

D held her palm horizontal at a little child’s height and said, “Me, small, Catholic.” She raised her had a little higher from the ground and said, “Me, bigger, Catholic.” Several more times, she raised her hand a little higher up to an adult’s height and said, “All the life, Catholic. Family, Catholic. Country, Catholic. Bible, no. I believe Jesus, Maria, King.”

I looked her in the eyes and said, “D, we’re not here to make you change your religion.” (Because it isn’t about a religion, it’s about a relationship.) “We’re here to offer you an encounter with God. God alone is the one who can give you the power to stop drinking. We can’t do that. God can. Only have your heart open to God and obey Him.”

I gave her a hug and said I was here for her and cared about her.

The hard thing is, she doesn’t understand Spanish well enough for me to explain the gospel to her, or explain that we’re not trying to get her to go against her conscience, or explain that Catholics can read the Bible, too, without doing any violence to their faith. Somewhere she got this idea deeply ingrained in her, and if she rejected the advance of people in her own country trying to approach her with the Bible, it will be that much harder with the language barrier.

A few days earlier, she had spoken to me about “Jesus, Maria, and King,” and I had asked her, “Yes, but who is able to give you power to change?” She didn’t understand my question at all. Another time, I was trying to explain that Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins, and she didn’t understand that, either. She didn’t understand “save,” “rescue,” “deliver,” or any other words I could think of, even when I acted out a little guy walking (my fingers) and falling off a cliff and something (my other hand) swooping in to “save” him in midair. She got so confused by the meaning of the words “save” and “danger” that the conversation just got lost.

So all I can do is pray. She has a Bible, but she couldn’t understand it if she would read it, and she wouldn’t read it even if it was in Polish.

Elliott Tepper, founder of Betel, preached a great message on Sunday on Romans 10:20: “I was found of them that sought me not; I was made manifest unto them that asked not after me.” I have been holding onto that thought for these girls. When they come here, they’re not seeking God. They just want freedom from the alcohol or drugs that hold them bound. But SO many of them find God, from whom they have been fleeing all their lives and whom they would naturally have gone on living without.

In the kitchen at the church, we made fried fish and mashed potatoes with cooked kale (or swiss chard? Or collard greens? Whatever acelgas is.)

After lunch, I got a little chance to get on my computer and update my blog and read my email.

Then it was time to go back to work. We cleaned up the kitchen and then had a women’s service, which they have at the church every Tuesday evening.

We went home and ate supper and showered. At 10:00, we all gathered in the salon for a play practice. The girls are putting together a skit for New Year’s Eve, and this was our first read-through. I am going to be in it as a 22-year-old student who is double majoring and is full of the cares of this world and speaks to her Christian neighbor. The theme of the play is Matthew 6:25-32, “Take no thought…” Carmen wrote the play.

We also drew names for a “secret pal” gift exchange at Christmas. Starting now, we can give our secret pal gifts and notes as often as we wish, but we will also have one special gift that we give on Dec. 25. My secret pal is C. Last Wednesday, when we worked together, we stopped at that Mercadona to look at the cologne, and while we were there, she happened to point out a facial cream that she likes a lot. I hope I can remember what it is to give it to her. I think I’ll recognize it if I see it again.

Oh! A brought a keyboard from the church! J So now I can begin to play for our morning devotions. Happiness!!

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Monday, November 21, 2011

Today I was assigned to stay home for the first time…no, really, the second time, I guess, because I was at home on Saturday, too. But today was different, so I’ll write about it.

Ah! My alarm went off at 6, and without a flutter, without a complaint, I got up immediately and had my devotions.

I forgot my coat and my glasses, so I wrapped myself in a blanket in the salon and had to read my Bible inches away from my face. Tomorrow I’ll have to set my coat out and not forget my glasses.

We ate breakfast at 7:30 and I was actually semi-done by the time the others left the room, but I think I still have been the last one at the table every meal. It’s not that I’m eating more…I don’t think…just that they eat really, really fast.

Devotions at 7:45 consisted of a couple of songs and then prayer for the rest of the time. I think I fell asleep.

When the girls left, I went to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. C, who was the responsible assigned to the house, found me there and told me that everyone was supposed to wait in the salon until the jobs were given out. Oh. Ooops! Again. But how was I to know? She told me to go ahead and finish my tea and come back to the salon.

When I got there, I was assigned the job of helping the wife of one of the married couples who lives in the house, and her apartment is behind one of the closed doors in the hallway that I didn’t know where it led. She broke her leg and her finger on Friday, and I was sent to clean the house for her. I vacuumed, mopped, and dusted. She was really nice and has two kids, a boy and a girl. Her apartment was lovely & cozy with 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, a kitchen, and a living room. It’s hard to believe that exists in this house along with all the rest of the space we have. And there are at least two or three other couples apartments here in the house…or four? (Note: Later I asked A and she said there are 7!!! The one I cleaned was the biggest.) I’m not used to living in a house this big.

I was done helping her at about 10:30, and C asked Q and I to mop the bedrooms and the hallways, which was already swept. We got the bedrooms done and that hallway, and we were about to start the hallway that the bathroom is in when C called us for our midmorning snack. I guess the girls eat a little “pinch” of something every day at 11:00. (It’s more like what I would usually eat for a regular lunch, and then they eat lunch at 2, which is more like what I would eat for dinner, and then they have another “little” snack at 4, and then dinner at 9, which is approximately equivalent to lunch.) Today we had tea and bread with butter and cheese. If I do this every day, I’m surely going to get fat.

We finished mopping after that and then helped C a little bit in the kitchen. Then she told us that there was nothing left for us to do, so we went to the salon.

Lunch was early—about 1:30—and it was just 6 of us: C, A2, Q, R, and O. We had garlic soup (made of garlic, bread, and jamón in a broth), liver with onions, and mashed potatoes. Yum!

Then we all went to the salon, where the girls laid down on sofas to rest. I sat in a chair to write in my journal because I wasn’t tired. Then, all of a sudden, I was tired. All the sofas were taken, and I went to my room to sleep in my bed.

C came to wake me up at about 4:20, and she said, “Look, you’re not allowed to sleep in your bed during the day except on Saturdays and Sundays. You can rest in the salon.”

“Vale (ok)” I said, but I was thinking, “What???” Up until now, the rules have been understandable and logical, and the only problem was that I didn’t know them. But this seemed quite arbitrary, especially when C herself took a nap in her bed when we worked together on Wednesday. Oh well…

I went to the kitchen and helped peel and slice potatoes for a tortilla de patatas. I also cut up eggplant for pisto, which was one of my favorite dishes I had forgotten about. I sort of got the idea of how to make it. Fry peeled tomatoes in oil until they’re falling apart. Add green pepper and onions and cook it down. Last of all, add eggplant and zucchini (both cut into like 1-cm cubes and sprinkled with salt ahead of time to release their liquids). Heat that up until the zucchini and eggplant are cooked but not falling apart. I don’t know if you add any seasonings other than salt.

When we got done with the food prep, we went back to the salon, and a little later, Q took a shower. After that, we returned to the kitchen. C was in the middle of making the tortilla de patatas, and Q started making the salad. I walked over to smell the pisto and made some comment like, “Oh, que bien,” (Oh, how wonderful). Carmen came over and said, “You know, it really stresses me out when you’re walking over here, getting in my way when I’m trying to work in the kitchen.”

I looked up in surprise. “Do you want me to leave?” I said.

“No,” she said. “It’s just that I’m trying to move around fast in here, and I don’t want to bump into you or anything. I just need my space,” she said.

I moved over the corner of the kitchen and looked around for something useful to do. But soon, Q came under C’s wrath and she said to me, “Please take her out of here.” So Q and I left the kitchen.

We sat in the salon for a little while and then Q asked to go back to the kitchen. “No,” I said. But she was going. “NO!” I said. (Not that an increase in volume would make any difference.) She wouldn’t swerve from her purpose, and as she’s not allowed to go anywhere by herself, I had to go along.

In the kitchen, Q started putting bread on the table. I did have to marvel that she knew what to do and was trying to be helpful.

But C yelled at her. “Q! Ask first! The girls are bringing fresh bread and we’re going to use that. Go away!”

So we left again.

We sat in the salon a little while longer and Q said she wanted to go to the kitchen again.

“Why?” I said.

“I want a drink of water.”

“Okay,” I said. “But you’re not going to get in trouble with C again, right?”

She shook her head, we went into the kitchen, and she immediately went over to C.

“C, have you calmed down?” she asked.

“Yes, everything’s done,” C said.

They gave each other a hug and Q started to put the drinks on the table. She had already put water in the pitchers earlier, and had put them in the refrigerator. Now she set them out on the table. Another instance of something helpful that I didn’t even know to think of.

We ate a yummy dinner of tortilla de patatas and pisto, two of my favorite Spanish foods.

After dinner, we went to the salon and I gave Lucy a massage. Then U wanted one, and then Q wanted one. Q was hilarious, because the massage was super ticklish to her, and I had barely touched her before she was rolling over, laughing. Her laugh was infectious, partly because I had never heard her laugh, and partly because it sounded so natural in contrast to the way she talks.

Then D wanted a massage, and her neck was really tight. She said it had been hurting for a week.

We got talking, and her Spanish is not good, but she started to confide in me. “I—Catholic,” she said. “The Bible, no.” I have—” (and here she named some book that was like a 5- or 6-syllable Polish word). She showed it to me; it was a little book in Polish with probably the mass and some prayers and some Bible verses. (I really don’t know; it was in Polish, but I saw the word “misa” (mass) and “Psalm 69” so… more or less I gathered what it was.)

In her broken Spanish, she expressed how she was Catholic, she had grown up Catholic, and all her family and her country was Catholic.

“You—Jesus only,” she said. “Me—Jesus, Maria, and King.”

“I know,” I said. I listened and nodded and detected a real agony of mind in her communication.

The next day’s devotion was going to be each girl sharing one or two verses from the Bible, and A came in and gave D a Bible so that she could find a verse to share.

I offered to help her find one, but she said, “Me, the Bible, no. I have my ___.” (That Polish word again.)

“But the Catholic Bible is the same as this one,” I explained. “The only difference is that you have some extra books that we don’t have.” (She didn’t understand this at all.)

She gently picked up the Bible and set it aside. “Thank you very much,” she said very graciously, “But not now.”

“What are you going to do tomorrow, then?” I asked. “All the girls have to read at least one verse. Why don’t we pick something that you agree with. You believe in Jesus. Pick something that Jesus said. Look, all the writing in red is words of Jesus.”

“No, but read Spanish, I no understand,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. I suggested “God is love” and “Jesus wept,” but she again politely closed the Bible and put it in a drawer.

“In my country,” she said, “I see people carrying Bible. They talk to me. I say, ‘No thank you.’ Someone come, my door, knock. Carrying Bible. I say, ‘No thank you.’ I Catholic. Bible, no.”

“Okay,” I said.

Then the other girls came in to the room to go to bed, and I went to bed, too.

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My Sixth Day

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Today was election day in Spain. The conservative party won.

We don’t have breakfast together on Sundays, it’s just everyone for herself, just like at home. I asked what time we get up and Anita said, “At 9:30 the van leaves, and you can figure out when you need to get up to make it.”

But at 8:15, R woke me up and said that I was going in the van with her and we were leaving at 9. “Okay,” I said, and hopped out of bed.

I had gotten up at 6:45 to do my devotions and had gone back to sleep.

One aspect I haven’t mentioned much about is shadowing. No one shadowed me when I arrived, but Q has to be shadowed all the time. Since she is my roommate, I end up shadowing her sometimes, although I think U and R have taken the greater part of the job. Even still, it can be difficult to plan for the interruption to whatever I was doing. For example, I have 5 minutes to make it to breakfast and I think I can just make it, when Q comes up to me and needs to go to the bathroom to wash her face or blow-dry her hair or whatever. Oh! Sure! We can go, and I will just skip whatever I was doing. Q is very ADD and can’t sit still for two minutes, so I have felt very dragged around. Now to the kitchen! Now to the bedroom! Now to the salon! Now to the bathroom! Back to the bedroom! And so forth.

Anyway, what with getting up late, having to leave earlier than I expected, and shadowing Q, I left a little late, but fortunately I wasn’t the last one in the van.

The punctuality here is tremendous, especially for Spanish culture. If you’re not 5 minutes early, you will be the last one to walk in the room. (This is very good for Rebekah, but it does not come naturally to her.)

When we got to church, R and U went to a class they attend called Adullam, and the rest of us girls went to the cafeteria and sat down to talk. Lucy bought me an orange juice, which was delicious because it was REAL, and we talked and waited.

E asked me if I would explain something from the Bible to her, and I said, “Sure.” So she turned to 1 Corinthians 13 (the love chapter) and asked me to explain it. “Okay,” I said. I read each verse, one at a time, and talked a little bit about what it meant.

Somehow, before I got to the end of the chapter, the conversation turned to my testimony of how the Lord worked in my life to conquer bitterness, and that opened her up to share with me some of her story.

She is from El Salvador, I think, and has a sister and mother and other relatives there. Her father left the family to work in the United States and later moved to Spain. At some point (perhaps upon moving to Spain?), E asked to go with him. At first, everything was great, but her father started treating her worse and worse and would go days without speaking to her. He was living with an Argentinian woman and had two children by her, and most of the time E was left in the house with her stepmother, who did nothing but yell. Finally, she decided things didn't have to go on like this and she came to Betel, where she has been much happier.

When it was time for the church service to start, I found out that there was a list posted in the house that I was supposed to have looked at, showing who went to church in what van, and who was shadowing whom. Apparently, I was shadowing A2 and Elizabeth. Okay---another instance of "oops"--I guess now I know for next time.

Church was good. I only knew one of the songs and I was more deeply touched Friday night by the service. Elliott Tepper (founder of Betel) preached, and it was interesting to hear his style of message and what he had to say. I do miss Pastor Joyce's preaching, though. It's more intellectually stimulating than the messages I have heard here so far, which are necessarily simple and basic for the people who are coming out of totally lost backgrounds. 

One thing that was notable was how many men there were in the church. It was probably 5% children, 20% women, and 75% men. The auditorium was full and people seemed to be really entering in to a spirit of worship and praise to God. 

We got back from church about 2:30, and everyone helped to pull out leftovers and heat them up for lunch. We ate, and then Q and I went to our room for a nap. We slept from about 3 to about 7, and when we got up, we went to the kitchen for some tea. 

We were drinking our tea when C came up to us. "Q," she said, "You are going to move into my bedroom, and Y [a different Y than my former roommate] is going to move into yours. Come and move your stuff so that Y can put her things into your wardrobe." 

C left the room and I put my hand on Q's. "Awwww...I'll miss you," I said.

Q didn't say anything and I asked, "What are you thinking?"

"Nothing," she said. “My mind is empty.”

Then she continued. “I’m thinking about my daughter. I’m always thinking about her. And I’m thinking about my beloved.”

“Your beloved?” I asked. “Who is that?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s a secret.”

“How did you meet?” I asked.

“The first time I came to Betel, we met,” she answered.

“Oh. Is he handsome?”

“He’s— ” (and here she made some answer that I didn’t understand).

“Is he young?” I inquired.

“A little older than me,” she said.

“Oh. What’s his name? I asked.

Q looked around furtively and put her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell this to anyone,” she said.

“Well, you know I can’t keep a secret here,” I said.

“If you tell, they’ll give me platos” (dishwashing chores as a punishment), she said.

“Really? Why?” I asked.

“If you tell, they’ll give me platos,” she repeated.

“So what’s his name?” I asked again.

“E,” she said. And she wrote it down on a scrap of something so I could see.

Just then someone came in the kitchen and the conversation was over.

Q and I went to our bedroom and she started pulling things out of her wardrobe. I helped her carry it over to C’s room, where she stayed putting her stuff away.

I went back to my room and started talking to Y, who was putting her stuff in Q’s old wardrobe. Y has been here only about a month, and she has been having a hard time. Lucy said when she first got her, she was always bursting into tears. She is about 40 and married and her husband is also in Betel, in one of the men’s houses. I guess he is doing great and loving it, while she is struggling.

I asked her how she came to know Christ, and she said that 20 years ago, her cousin dove into a pool and got paralyzed. His parents, in the effort to make him get better, took him to witches and all sorts of sorcerers. When that didn’t work and they saw that those people merely took your money and didn’t do anything except leave you with more turmoil in your heart, they turned to some Christians. The Christians introduced the family to Christ, and although the cousin remained paralyzed, the rest of the family was healed (in their hearts) when they accepted Christ. The cousin became a prayer warrior and memorized a vast amount of Scripture. Y’s father and the paralyzed boy’s father were brothers, and her father was the first to hear the gospel from his brother. Then, little by little, the family converted to Christ.

So I don’t know how they went from there to needing Betel, but maybe later I’ll hear the story.

We ate dinner at 9, and then several of the girls went into the salon to watch a movie. I went and brought my knitting. It’s a scarf I’ve been working on since 2009, and I finally figured I could finish it if I cut it in half, made a section of plain, easy knitting for the middle, and then attached the fancy part to both ends.

I was cutting it in half (carefully, by snipping only one stitch and then unraveling it bit by bit while I recovered the loops of the stitches on some spare needles), sitting in front of the television, and even though I was barely looking up at the movie, it was so horrible I had to move to another seat with my back to the TV.

When I got the pieces apart, I went into the smaller salon, where A was practicing the guitar, and asked if I could practice with her. It had been at least a year since I had picked up a guitar, and I had never learned to actually play because I had to look at my fingers and place them one by one on the right places on the strings in order to get any given chord, but I thought, “Hey, if I practice starting now, maybe I’ll have a chance to pick it up.”

A had to remind me how to do the chords (I only know A, C, D, E, Em, and G, and that’s about all she knows, too), and at first it was laughable how bad I was. But as we practiced, I got a little better—not good enough to play for our devotions yet, but a little more fluent.

It was 11:55 when we finished practicing, and we went to bed.

Next Post: Monday, November 21, 2011
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Spanish Roses

I couldn't resist posting these pictures, taken today, of the roses that are blooming around the edge of the Betel property. Amazing at this time of year! (Well, I guess not for Spain, but for me.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Church service

Church on Friday night. On Sunday it was full. This auditorium fits about 1300 people.

My Fifth Day

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Ah! I got up this morning and actually prayed, and I felt like a chain had been broken that had me tied to the flesh’s way of doing things. Praise God!

I was struggling between getting up and yielding to sleep. Oh, I almost, almost yielded. But everything put together, all that God has been doing…Ah! He succeeded!

The Lord reminded me of the picture I had first seen a long time ago: Christ is in the midst of the fire, and he beckons me to come. The flesh refuses, flees, resists, but the Spirit is made of sterner stuff and resolutely steps forth into the “certain death” that the fire threatens. However, the spirit is made of inflammable material; only the flesh burns up. That’s why the flesh didn’t want to go there and why the spirit didn’t mind.

So this morning when I sat up and partially emerged from the covers and a blast of cold air hit me, I very nearly turned back to warm, cozy comfort. But the Lord whispered a thought to me that was enough to tip the balance toward obedience: “It’s a very cold fire this morning.”

(Ha! I like that on so many levels. God, I was just wishing for an intellectual conversation with someone and didn’t see any potential immediate source—but I forgot about YOU! You—who can meet me exactly on my level, converse intelligently and knowledgeably about any topic (!) and always have something more, something tantalizing, something so cool and multifaceted and satisfying to think about—YES!)

So I had 45 lovely minutes of communion with my God, my love, my Savior, my life, the Spirit that lives in me and works His mighty wonders according to His will.

Glory!

We had breakfast a little later since it was Saturday. Devotions were simply gathering in the salon, saying a simple prayer, and scattering to our separate jobs.

U came up to me at breakfast and said, “Can you cook?”

“Yes,” I replied.

So I got assigned to cook lunch, with A2 as my helper.

U said it was “stewed meat and potatoes,” any way I wanted to make them. The meat was lamb ribs, about 10 pounds, which I had no idea how to make, but I just cut it up into chunks, made a broth, made twice-baked potatoes and a salad…and it turned out fine.

As I was cooking, there naturally were things to hand wash, but I couldn’t find any soap. “They must have it around here somewhere,” I thought. “Don’t tell me they wash the dishes without soap.” Finally, I asked one of the girls, and she said, “It’s right there,” pointing. “Oh. This.” I said. It was toilet bowl cleaner. “Okaaaaay—we wash the dishes with toilet bowl cleaner,” I thought. I fought down a rising sense of grooooooosss.” Gulp. I forged ahead, squeezed the toilet bowl cleaner into the sponge, and washed the dish.

One curious thing about cooking lunch was how much time I had to do it. I started at about 9, or a little after, and I had to have it ready by 3. However, all the time I was thinking it was supposed to be ready at 2, and even still, I felt like I had tons of time.

A2 made a soup and cleaned the pantry somewhat and disappeared. D, who is Polish and barely speaks any Spanish, finished what she was doing and came to help me. She has only been in Betel for 2 weeks and misses her home terribly. She also doesn’t like to get bored and tends to stay active doing something or other.

While D was cleaning out the refrigerators, working very fast and being as efficient as possible, I kept hearing U say to her, “D—we’re not in a hurry. D, tranquia. I was trying to be fast and efficient in the kitchen, too, but when I heard U saying this to D, I thought, “I’m going to have to calm down, too, if I’m going to get this food made slowly enough.” What a curious thing to have to do!

After we ate lunch, the girls brought in all this food that they had gotten through recuperación (pickimg up food donations at grocery stores, butcher shops, and bakeries that donate to Betel. They had to open up all the bags and put the food away. This included organizing all the meat so that similar types of meat were stored together and so forth. Y (not my old roommate) was taking notes on everything we had, E was cutting up leeks and filling freezer bags, O was cleaning little sardine-sized fish, and the whole kitchen and dining room area was a swarming bustle of activity.

It was R’s turn to wash the dishes, and I offered to help. “You can dry and put away for me,” she said. “Here’s the towel.”

I looked at it with what must have been an obviously disapproving gaze. That towel had been used for everything from a potholder to a hand towel since I had been in the kitchen, and it was already damp when I arrived, so who knows what it had done before that.

“What, is it not clean?” R asked.

“Not really,” I said. It was damp all over and streaked with visible dirt.

R took a closer look at it. “It’s fine,” she said. “Go ahead and use it.” So I gingerly dried the dishes using the least possible contact with the cleanest part of the towel I could find.

When the dishes were done, I helped R take out the garbage to the van, where they were going to take it to a dumpster. There was a ton of garbage, from a broken exercise bike to a broken dresser to full, stinky bags from the kitchen trash to bags of stale bread that we hadn’t eaten. We filled up the entire back of the van, which was about the size of the area in our 15-passenger van when the two back seats were taken out, and drove off.

When we got to the dumpster, we unloaded all our stuff into and around it. It was empty when we started, and it was full to overflowing, with stuff piled on the street beside it when we finished.

Later I found out that what we had done was illegal. Apparently you can get a big fine for filling up a dumpster that isn’t “yours.” So that’s why they were in such a hurry to dump the trash. But I guess they do it every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, looking for a different dumpster each time.

After taking the garbage, we drove over to Betel’s mechanic shop for some work to get done on the van. I guess it’s always using water. On the way to the shop, R pointed out several groups of girls who were standing in roundabouts and said they were prostitutes. How sad!

We drove back to our house in another van that had followed us to take us home, and I got to talk with Lucy all the way back. She is just wonderful, and we had a great conversation.

We got back to the house and I helped R hang up some laundry. Then I went to our room and watched Q for a while. She was playing with her hair and some makeup samples, because she’s going to church tomorrow, and she’s quite excited about that. She wants to look pretty.

At 9:00, it was time for dinner. Marlene and Lucy had made homemade Mexican taquitos, which were really yummy.

Then we went to bed. 

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My Fourth Day

Friday, November 18, 2011

I think I’m starting to get the hang of this.

Get up at 7. (I set my alarm for 6 but slept through it again. The night before, I had the firmest of resolutions to get up in the morning, but Q had to go to the bathroom twice, and as she’s not allowed to go by herself, she woke me up to go with her, and the blast of cold air that hit me each time I got out of bed was enough to knock the sleep out of anyone. Of course, I was able to fall back asleep…just not stay mostly asleep during the trip to the bathroom. The first time it happened, I said to myself, “Ohhhh…I’m going to be tempted to not get up in the morning now.” The second time it happened, I said to myself, “Ohhhh…How am I ever going to get up?” And when the alarm rang, it was theh same old line I always fall for: “Just do your prayers in bed for a few minutes. Then you can wake up.” Eyes closed, head on pillow, “Dear God…” and Boom! The next thing I knew, it was 7:00.)

Anyway—Get up at 7, eat breakfast at 7:30 as fast as you can (4 galletas and a glass of water, for instance), have devotions at 7:45, leave for work at 8:30.

My assigned job was the kitchen in the Betel center with M and O, and we drove there without any incident.

Oh—Let me back up—my roommate Y and another girl left in the morning to go to thei airport. They are returning to their home country, Bulgaria.

In the kitchen, O set me to work washing and breaking up lettuce for salad. Once that was done, I asked what else I could do.

M, who was in charge of the kitchen, seemed to be thinking. “I guess the kitchen seems pretty relaxed today,” she finally said.

Well, this simply wouldn’t work for me. “Can I clean anything?” I asked. “Sweep the floor, wipe the counters, clean the fridge?” (I had noticed that a sign posted on the wall said that the Friday job was to clean the fridge.)

“Okay, I guess you can clean the fridge,” M said. O showed me where a bucket and a rag were, and I began wiping down the inside and outside of the fridge.

At some point during the morning, M got a call that P, A’s fiancée, had come out of the coma. “Wow… I thought. “What is God doing?”

M, the head cook, was preparing garbanzos and quail and chorizo and salad for dinner, which would be at 2:00. After finishing with the fridge, I asked her if I could help clean the quail, of which we had about 60, and they still had all the insides in them. After they were cleaned, M laid them out in a big sheet pan with some seasonings to bake in the oven.

While O was putting the chorizo (typical Spanish sausage) on a cookie sheet to go into the oven, she offered me a piece to taste.

“Um, it’s raw, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes, but this kind is okay to eat raw,” O said. “Here, just try a little bit.”

She cut off a slice and I said, “Okaaaaay…” and ate it. Maybe it’s like summer sausage that you can eat as is, I thought. It tasted fine…actually it was quite yummy…so how could I know?

Just then, M walked in. “Why are you eating that chorizo raw?” she asked.

“Oh! Is it not okay to eat it raw?” I asked.

“You’ve got to be careful about things like that,” M continued.

I turned to O and said, “Are you deceiving me, or what?”

O showed M the kind of sausage she had given me. “Ohhh,” M said. “Yeah, that’s fine.”

Whew. What a relief.

We ate lunch and then I had about an hour and a half to get on my computer and write home. I updated my blog and wrote as many emails as I could. I had at least 20 messages in my inbox. YAY!

Then it was time to clean up the kitchen, which O and I did together. We talked and she told me some of her story.

It is amazing to see the transformation God has wrought in these ladies’ hearts. O is the most cheerful, positive, giving person you could meet. You would never know that she had a messed-up past just by meeting her. There is a sparkle in her eye and a kindness in her voice that shows what a profound work God can do in a heart yielded to Him. I love her laugh, and she’s always laughing.

After we cleaned up the kitchen (which I did with much energy, due to a cup of coffee I drank just before starting), I had about 2 more hours to get on my computer, which was great! I almost got caught up on my blog.

Towards the end, I started talking to a woman named Mercedes who told me some of her testimony. She was not a Betelita but attended the Betel church and apparently knew many of the girls. Her story was very interesting.

At exactly 8:30, the church service started and went until…I didn’t check when…probably 9:30. The songs were all so meaningful, it brought me to tears. The Lord really touched my heart regarding getting up in the morning.

We went back to the house, ate dinner about 11:00 pm, and turned out the light at midnight.

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