Sunday October 25

Earlier in the week I was asked by a pastor to speak at a church on Sunday, he told me that I could give a short devotion for about 5 min and he would preach the rest of the sermon. As the week went on every time I talked to the pastor he talked me into speaking just a little longer until he somehow got me to agree to preach the entire sermon. Now I would have been happy to preach without any reservations if I were able to speak in English. But my reservations laid in the fact that I have only been here for 7 weeks and I barely know their trade language. The church we were going to was a church way out in the bush where the members barely knew pidgin let alone English. But none the less God was with me and encouraged me to take another leap and go to this place to preach his word. The process of getting to the church could be a whole blog post in itself but I will spare you the details. In short we took the PMV (public motor vehicle) with the pastor down the road from the hospital about 10 miles for 1 kina (about 40 cents). Then we walked up a small mountain till we got to the church; interesting side note, the church was such a bush church that they didn’t even have a building, they just sat on the grass outside. This is pretty neat because they didn’t seem at all concerned with the fact that they didn’t have a building, and it was a great model for the church all over the world. When Paul talks about the church he is not talking about a building he is talking about a body of believers in fellowship with one another. Today we tend to think of the church as a building and not a body of people, but at this place all they had was their fellowship, no building yet they still call themselves a church. As we were walking up the mountain together the pastor sprung new information on me. He let me know that once we were done speaking at the church without a building, we would be going to another church that was a 30 min walk farther up the mountain. It was funny how I had first agreed to talk at a church for 5 min and it grew giving full on back to back sermons. As we were waiting for the service to start at the first church we got news that the church I was going to speak at second was coming down the mountain to the first church to combine services. So I only preached once. Once the service was over and I was all out of pidgin words to say we sat around and talked with the people there. Their pidgin was not that good since they rarely use it, they were much more comfortable with their tok ples (native/tribal language) so having conversations with them was difficult. But through the language barriers we still had a great time and the people of the church at Tombil seemed pleased that we came (Rachel and I were, somehow, the first missionaries to speak at this church and the first white people some of the children had ever seen).

This experience was both exhausting and exiting all at the same time. There are so many frustration things here in PNG yet for everything that is frustrating or emotionally draining there are three more things that can make you smile or lift your spirits.