frustratingly funny

Have you ever fallen asleep during a sermon? Or during class? Yesterday, I didn’t fall asleep, but it’s only by the grace of God, or maybe because I was sitting on a tiny uncomfortable bench.

Yesterday, Paula (one of my teammates) and I went to a distant Maasai village to do a teaching on HIV and AIDS. We went with a missionary and a Kenyan man who was from this village and set up the appointment. When we arrived, we were asked to pay 100 shillings to enter the meeting, (apparently it was a conference that was lasting 10 days) and then were led to a bench in the front row. This is where we remained through the next 4 sermons. Sermons which were in the Kimaasai language and translated into Kiswahili, but not into English. Sometimes I have a hard enough time paying attention to an English sermon, but 4 hours of sermons in other languages…it’s a little much. Since we were in the front row, I couldn’t even observe all of the villagers with their colorful outfits and beads. But thankfully, there were some diversions. Such as the flies that landed on me constantly…some of them even mating while landing on me. There was a little tiny moth flying around and exploring that I watched for a while, but that got boring. They did have an altar call where many of the people came up to be prayed for, and it was at this point that I almost burst out laughing, which I’m sure would have been completely inappropriate. But as they were praying for these people, many of the ladies were being “slain in the Spirit” (I’m not sure why the men weren’t). Now, I grew up in a charismatic church, so this is nothing new to me. But whenever I’ve seen people being slain in the spirit, their whole body has remained stiff as they fall. These women were falling in the sitting position, and they were falling all over on top of each other, and I thought it was amazing that nobody got hurt. It was just a tangled mess of people, which for some reason was really funny to me.

I also had lots of time to think and ponder deep questions. Can one have faith without hope? If I have given up hope in a certain situation, can I still have faith that the end result will be what I had previously hoped for? I don’t really think they can be mutually exclusive. If I don’t have hope for something, how can I have faith that it will happen? I don’t know. I just felt that God encouraged me to have faith in a certain situation that I had previously felt he had led to me give up hope in. Maybe my problem is that I let emotion get in the way too much. Or maybe my problem is that I think about these things while Kenyan women are playing Twister with God right in front of me.

Whenever a new person got up to talk, we expected to be introduced and do our teaching, but that wasn’t happening…and we had no idea what was happening, since we couldn’t understand anything. After 4 hours, when it was past time for us to be going home, they told us that they weren’t planning on having us speak. This is something they had decided before we came, but decided not to tell us until 4 hours after we got there. It was a little frustrating to say the least. We had driven a couple of hours, 30 minutes of it on a dirt road full of ruts…well more like a dirt path. We sat there for 4 hours…and then drove back home, hoping to arrive in the city before dark. Such is life…especially in Africa.