In which I arrive at church almost late and with no Bible

Sometimes God just surprises me.

I didn't go to Huacarpay last night, like normal, because I had a promotion party for the 6th graders.  To celebrate both the completion of elementary and then high school, Peruvian students have a promotion party.  Last night was the party for 6th grade and I didn't get home and in bed until at around 12:45 am.

This explains why it was hard for me to extricate myself from the warm cocoon of blankets this morning and convince my eyelids to stay open.  This was one of the days when it took a while.

And then God and I had a talk about how sometimes I feel like my faith is like this chloroformed laboratory frog that I'm trying to figure out and dissect.  I mean, I've got the Bible (in several versions and languages), I've got a ton of books telling me how to live it out.  But sometimes, I feel like I'm just reading and going through the motions, not really living it out.  Sometimes I feel like I read too much, know too much, and live it too little.  Maybe the rest of you haven't ever felt like that, but I have.  It's not like my relationship with God isn't real, but I want it to be more real and I want to figure out how to live it every day and in every situation.  I heard this testimony the other day of a guy who had an incredible divine appointment in a guitar shop and really showed God's love to the guy he met up with.  Made me wish I knew how to live out love like Jesus did.  Made me wish I would have showed more love yesterday and I knew how to show it every day.  

And then I got out of bed and there was no water in my house.  This isn't a terribly uncommon situation, but it is rather frustrating.  So I started heating up water to take a bucket bath.  As the water was heating, I was doing other things, when I suddenly looked at the clock and realized that I wanted to leave in about 15 minutes.  So I hurried through my bath, praying "God, please send me a bus to get to church on time!"  I got ready and ran out of the house only about 5 minutes after I'd wanted to leave originally.

I stood on the sidewalk praying "God, please send me a bus!", realizing that if any passed me by without stopping, I'd probably be late to church.  So I started trying to get anything to stop.  On a whim, I decided to try to stop a bus headed to Puno, a town on Lake Titicaca, about 7 hours away.  And, wonder of wonders, it actually stopped.  Both the fact that I tried to get it to stop and the fact that it did are strange in themselves.

I climbed aboard after the driver assured me he'd stop in Huacarpay.  It was a bus in which the passengers are in a compartment separated from the driver's compartment by a wall and a door.  The driver indicated that I should sit in the empty seat in the driver's compartment and I sat, amazed that I actually got to ride to church sitting down and thanking God that I actually got a bus to stop.

And then the driver started asking me about myself, where I was from and what I was doing here, if I enjoy Cusco, if I've learned Quechua, all the normal stuff.  Then he asks me if I like chicha, the local corn beer.  (What a random question, but whatever.)  I told him I didn't, but I do like chicha morada and chicha blanca, both non-alcoholic juices made from corn.  So then he asks me if I drink beer.  I told him I don't, so then he said "Oh, you must be from some religious group".  So I told him I'm a Christian and he sounded surprised to hear there are Christians in the US.  He said he's sympathetic to Christianity, but doesn't go to church because he's always busy driving his bus.  So I encouraged him to go to church before it's too late.  We continued talking.  He asked me if I was a pastor and I told him I'm not.  And then he asked me if I had a bookstore where he could get a Bible.  So I told him "Well, I have a Quechua Bible with me right now.  Here, you can have it."  He looked at me kinda weird, like "I just picked up this gringa off the side of the road and now she's giving me a Bible?!"  He asked me for my cell number and I gave it to him.  He said he wants a big Bible, a new one, and I told him all I could do for him at the moment was give him mine.  I marked the gospels for him and encouraged him to start there.  

We parted with him asking me to be praying for his safety and saying that he'll try to come to church sometime in December and me going "Whoa God, this is a crazy divine appointment!" and assuring him I'd be praying.  

I got off the bus in Huacarpay and felt like jumping for joy.  Whoa, God, you're awesome!   God loves a Quechua-speaking bus driver named Justo!  God loves me!  And, just, wow God!

Eventually, the doubts came.  Was he being serious about trying to make it to church?  Should I have said more or done more?  Should I have even given out my cell number to a complete stranger?  Will he actually read the Bible?  

In the midst of it all, I realized that, you know, God orchestrated it, so I'll leave the results in His hands and keep praying.

And that is how I got to church today almost late and without a Bible.  And how God showed me that He's in control and He knows and cares about how I'm feeling.  And how He reminded me again how it's totally not about me. 

God, You're amazing!

Grace and what happens when "It just popped out!"

So I haven't been blogging regularly for a while for two reasons...
1 - Believe it or not, my life isn't THAT much different than yours, though it's happening in another country.  I'm honestly not sure what to write about most of the time.
2 - I love reading other people's blogs about all their thoughts and things, but I don't think I'm quite up to that par and, quite honestly, I'm not sure what you would think if you knew what all goes on in my head...

That being said, here are a few of those thoughts...

Where do I begin?  Maybe with Jonatan in August of 2008, my first year of teaching, when I realized that, contrary to how I'd always unconsciously looked at myself, I had lots of areas to grow in and I realized for the first time that my sinful nature was much more active than I'd ever realized.  Jesus said that if you are even angry with someone it's the same as murder.  Well, I, this good girl raised in the church who'd always stuck to all the rules, I was a murderer, then.  Cause I was sure angry with  Jonatan and it scared me silly.
That was also the day when God told me that, though I'm surprised by my own sin nature, He wasn't and it was for that precise reason that He died.  It was a turning point in my walk with Jesus.
Ever since that day, there has been a battle inside of me between Romans 7 (I do what I do not want to do) and Romans 8 (there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus).  Ever since that day, I've been struggling to overcome my sin nature.  Ever since that day, I've been frustrated that it still rears its ugly head (and much more often than I think it should!).  And ever since that day, I've been SLOWLY learning about God's grace and love in the midst of it all.
It's now been 5 years and hundreds of students and many good days and bad days since Jonatan.  But the battle is still there.  There have been days when I think I'm maybe finally starting to get it and there have been days when I think I'm hopeless.
Thursday was one of the latter.
This time it was Flor.  She admitted to me that she didn't pay attention in math class because she wanted me to help her after school.  And that did not sit well with me....to say the least!  I'll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say I may have had a right to be angry, but I certainly didn't have a right to react the way I did.
I walked home after school feeling downtrodden, feeling that old familiar voice of condemnation rising up.
And the next morning, in my journey through Romans, I hit 8:1 - "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus".  And those old, familiar questions arose.  God, how?  I don't understand.
And God answered and for the first time I started to see.  There is no condemnation because Jesus took it all  on Himself when He was on the cross and then He took it away and rose again without it.
And then there came Christian Education class and the accusation: "Kusi said..."
I stopped taking down prayer requests and took up my Bible.
Proverbs 18:21 - "The tongue has the power of life and death."
What does it mean to speak life and what does it mean to speak death?  Yesterday, I spoke life and I spoke death.  I looked into Flor's eyes.  Jose Ricardo nodded.  He was there.  He heard it.  He knew.
The surprise was audible.  You spoke death?  They didn't need to know details.  Just the fact.
Yes, I did.  You know, I'm really trying, but sometimes it just comes out.  It's like El Chavo del 8, an old TV program where El Chavo says to his teacher "¡Se me chispoteó!", which roughly translates to "It just popped out!"
I flipped over to Romans 7, which happens to be one of my favorite Bible passages, simply because I can relate so well.  They looked at me as if I'd just grown an extra head as I read "What I do is not the good I want to do; rather, the evil I do not want to do, I do."
20 little faces said "THAT is in the BIBLE???!!"
Hands pierced the air when I asked who has ever felt like that.  You know, sometimes "It just pops out!"  You try and you try to do what you know is right, but it. just. happens.
I looked at the ceiling and raised my hand dramatically as I wailed "What a wretched man I am!" (Which, in Spanish says "Soy un pobre miserable!  I am a poor, miserable man!"  They liked that.)  "Who can rescue me from this body of death?"
They were still awed by the fact that this was coming from the BIBLE, of all places!
They raised their hands.  They identified.  We pray every morning for good behavior.  It was their idea.
But.
And here it was that I began to realize something.  I'm so far from perfect.  I grope for life's nonexistent undo button.  I wish I could be more patient.  But that very weakness, that very imperfection, the very fact that the undo button is nonexistent, also allows me to share the little I understand of the gospel with my kids.
And so I shared.
And we remembered our smashed bread from Easter (see my last blog post) and how Jesus took all our sins on Himself and they crushed Him and smashed Him and pierced Him.  "That bread was FLAT!" they all remembered.
And now, when I mess up, when "it just pops out", God doesn't look at me with His angry face and say "You deserve to DIE!!"  Because Jesus has already taken all God's anger away.  So now I don't get God's anger.  I don't get condemnation.  I don't get death.  I get God's love and His sorrow at my sin.  But the condemnation is gone because it's buried in death with Jesus.
I'm not giving up the battle, but maybe I'm starting to give up hating the fact that it exists and wishing that God would hurry up with that sanctification thing because I'm about to drive myself nuts.
Because without the battle there would be no grace, without grace there would be no good news of Jesus, without the good news, what hope would I have to share with a bunch of imperfect kids who live with me and have to grow up in this sin-stained world just as I do?
What if my battles can give me what I need to help my kids with theirs?

Math books, bread and Isaiah 53

I'm doing the Resurrection Eggs with my kids these few weeks leading up to Easter.  This is the first time I've ever gotten to teach Bible classes at PROMESA and, as much as it fills up my schedule and makes life a bit more hectic, I'm loving it at the same time.  So I decided to start off the year with the Resurrection Eggs.  For those who don't know, they're simple plastic Easter eggs with a Christian symbol of Easter inside.  I'm enjoying seeing how the kids are really "getting it", as well as getting into it.
Today's Easter egg was supposed to contain bread.  As I was contemplating this morning how to make this memorable (besides giving my kids some bread to eat), suddenly Isaiah 53 connected with the Last Supper in my mind.  "This is my body, broken for you."..."For surely he has borne our sorrows and our infirmities...He was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.  The judgment that brought us peace was upon him."  And God gave me an idea, which actually spoke to my heart too.
I took some bread with me to school.  And we talked about how the bread represented Jesus' body.  And then I put it inside a plastic bag and laid it on a student's desk.
Math books are about the heaviest thing in my classroom, especially a stack of 20 of them.  So I passed the kids' math books out to them.  "Right now," I told them, "these are not math books.  These are your problems and the times you get sick and all the bad things you do.  How many of you have problems?"  The air filled with hands.  I know some of their problems.  Divorce.  Fighting at home.  Trying to learn languages.  Alcoholism.  "How many of you get sick?"  Again, hands filled the air.
And then I tossed my math book on top of the bread.
The kids' eyes got big.  "You're killing the bread!" the boys shouted.  (They seemed to think this was rather cool.)  "Who wants to put their book on top of the bread?" I asked.  Hands shot up and one by one they all gently placed  or smacked their book on top of the stack.  When the piece of bread had been smashed by the weight of 20 math books, I took it out, now more closely resembling a tortilla than a piece of bread.
And then I read, "He was pierced for our transgressions."  "What does it mean to be pierced?" I asked them.  And then I stuck my finger through the bread and stood there with it on my hand.  "No, don't!" said some of them.  Poke.  Another hole.  Poke.  Poke.  Poke.  And I stood there with my holey piece of bread in hand.  "This is what Jesus went through.
"He was crushed for our iniquities," and I tore the piece of bread in enough pieces for each of us to have one.
I held up the bag with the pieces of bread.  "This is what I deserved.  This is what you deserved.  But Jesus took that punishment for us.  And He carried all our problems, so that when we enter into a problem, we find that Jesus is already there and He is helping us in the midst of our problems."
I can't say they were all sitting there in reverent awe, deeply aware of their sin and how Jesus is already present in their problems.  I can't say there was deep repentance.  I can't say I saw fruit.
All I can say is that Jesus is touching me.  And hopefully He is touching them also.