Saturday and Sunday Morning

This is my first opportunity to sit down and update the blog! It's been pretty much a whirlwind of a trip so far.

We left Jackson on Saturday morning at 4am and by the time we hit West Memphis, we felt like we would make good time. And then the rain came. And came. And came. All the way just the other side of Houston, TX. Our driving slowed down and so what would normally have taken about 15 hours to drive took us about 20! But talk about God's timing. Storms in the Houston Area had delayed a number of flight (or outright cancelled them) and we arrived in Harlingen (near the border) within MINUTES of when Rebecca Climer's delayed flight arrived around 12midnight. We picked up Rebecca and drove the rest of the way through Brownsville, TX and across the border around 2:30am and into a Matamoros that was alive with young people driving the main strip! After sitting in heavy traffic for thirty minutes or so we finally made it to our hotel and four hours of sleep. Oh yeah, Lynette called me on my cell phone about 11pm and said she had talked to Pastor Lalo and that I would be preaching Sunday morning at one of his churches!

Sunday morning brought our first taste of Mexican cuisine. The team had breakfast in the Hotel restaurant and enjoyed eggs, grilled onions, and beans on flour tortillas. Lynette told the team to be downstairs and ready to leave for Lalo's church by 9am but she didn't get there until around 9:30. Already, Lynette was beginning to exhibit what we call "Mexican time!" By the way, Lynette also drives like they do down here!

Worship on Sunday Morning at Lalo's church was amazing. In Mexico, they have their children's worship in the morning and their "main" service in the evening. The children's service was as good as any main service I've been to!



From Lalo's main church we went to the church of a pastor friend of his who is in Monterrey awaiting surgery. I preached there on the power of Christ's resurrection (coming off of Easter Sunday last week) and had my first experience of having a sermon simultaneously translated into another language. It changes your style a little and forces you to speak in shorter phrasings and easy to understand sentences. As always, it was God's way of telling me to slow down when I speak and share less out of my "head" and more from the "heart" which that style of preaching forces you to do!

We invited the folks to come forward for prayer and our team and Pastor Lalo ministered to them for quite some time. I was amazed that many of the things they asked for prayer for were things that people in the U.S. ask us to pray for them about: family members, the economy, healing for physical pain, freedom to do what they were created to do. We had a young boy wheeled forward in a wheel chair by his father. From what I could tell, the boy hadn't been out of his wheel chair in a long time and certainly the family had given up any hope that he would walk again. The child had a blank and distant stare before Pastor Lalo began praying for him. As Lalo prayed, though, something began to change. The child began to smile and become more focused. Lalo had the boldness to lift the child from the wheel chair and stand him on his feet and help him to take steps. Immediately, again, the child's countenance changed. He beamed. The family had given up any hope that the child would ever walk again and here in front of all of our eyes the child was being encouraged to take steps with Lalo's assistance. Lalo told the father, "This child will walk again." And we believed him.

What I will remember from that experience most is not just that a boy was lifted from a wheel chair, put on his feet, and with the help of another allowed to take steps on wobbly legs (a powerful metaphor for Christ-formed community, is it not?) but the look on his face. It changed from unfocused and hopeless to joy-filled and aware. Someone had dared to believe that God could heal him and shown the confidence in believing something other than the lie that he would never walk again but instead be resigned to life in a chair. Before you react to that, I want you to think about the testimony of hope powerfully present in that picture. How often do WE come to believe that we are consigned and confined to life in a kind of spiritual or emotional or even physical wheel chair?

Why are miracles necessary today? Because of this very point. Miracles point us beyond the powers in this world we resign ourselves to, the powers that always limit us and keep us living in the shadow of life and they point us to the power that is greater "than he who is in the world." (1Jn 4:4) They always work to the glory of God (not the glory of humans) and remind us that in God, all things are possible.

We ate lunch with Lalo and his daughter, Alyhandra (also our translator)at his favorite Mexican restaurant. That strikes me as funny for some reason and then were able to rest a bit in the afternoon before the evening's services.