Well, things are rolling along down here in Guatemala. It´s been an extremely busy week. After my nice vacation/touristy time in Lake Atitlan, David threw me into what seems like what the rest of my stay here will look like.
My days were spent at the church, or the ¨Christian Culture Center of Guatemala.¨ Days start around 5:30, when I leave for the center (or, rather, when I´m ready to leave. When we actually leave varies from day to day... people here don´t have a developed sense of punctuality). I help serve breakfast to the kids, then help clean up and also eat breakfast for myself. For part of the day, I teach English to the kids who come (some days it´s in the morning, some in the afternoon). The rest of my time this week was spent constructing a huge database of all the kids in their program, with different information including logistics like address and parents´ names as well as a few of their favorite things. It´s tedious work, but it´s for a good cause: this is the list they use to organize all the kids and present them to potential sponsors. By the way, if anybody wants to sponsor a kid, they ask for 30 dollars a month. That provides breakfast every weekday and helps provide other stuff for the instruction/homework help time during the day. If anybody´s interested, there´s a lot of kids without sponsors: e-mail me or let me know, and I´m sure Davíd would be thrilled to set it up.
So that´s my days, and my evenings are short... I´m asleep by 10 every night, and often earlier. Data entry plus kids plus the whole speaking in Spanish thing is pretty effectively exhausts me.

So that was Monday through Thursday, and then yesterday I went with 5 members of the church to Rio Dulce (sweet river), a beautiful lowcountry river area. This is another one of those village feeding programs that (I think) I talked about in a previous post. (If you wanna sponsor a weekend, it´s about 500 bucks) Sorry for the shameless solicitation of funds... I know most of you are college kids, and thus barely know what it feels like to have 500 dollars, much less give it away. No pressure. This was another remote village with a lot of poverty going on. The poverty here was a little prettier, though. Instead of cinderblock homes with corrugated steel for a roof, they had bamboo and wood homes with a thatched roof. Very pretty, but it doesn´t mean they can afford more food or better health care. Again, though, they were genuinely joyous and a nice blessing for me after a week of a lot of tedious work.

I talked to David afterwards, and he asked me one of those probing questions that takes me a while to answer. Of course, there was the normal stuff like how did you like the area (it was fantastic), did you get to see the monkeys (no), how did you sleep (not well), did you get eaten up by mosquitos (no, thanks to a fantastic mosquito net and lots of bug spray). But then he asked what I thought about the work God was doing there. It took me a second to formulate my answer, but this was more or less my response: Of course, I never got to see the villages before they started the program, but from the joy in the children´s eyes and their eagerness to learn about the Bible, it´s easy to see that God is doing great things. It got me thinking again about what I believe is the best way to spread the Gospel. There´s an old cliche that goes something like, ¨share the gospel every day. If necessary, use words.¨ Now, I don´t agree completely... God gave us his holy word for a reason. However, I think the basic sentiment isn´t far off base... God calls us to feed the hungry, to give water to the thirsty, etc. It´s something that´s been on my mind of late, the fact that it seems like in America it seems we´ve sort of lost our sense of this calling. Why do we have churches that seem like castles, and yet have hungry that go unfed? Obvously, hunger isn´t as apparent in America as it is here, but there are other tangible needs that go unmet by churches with unbelievable cash flow. As always, these are generalizations drawn from limited observation, but in my limited observation here I´ve seen a church whose members don´t have much to begin with giving their time and money to people who need it more than they do.

A few times I´ve been asked, ¨What is your job at your church?¨ I had no idea what they were asking, really, until David explained to me that an obligation for membership in the church here is that you have a job in it, that you are an active participant in the extension of God´s grace to this community through his body. It took me a while to think through and accept, but I´m on board. If we´re part of Christ´s body and we believe that he is working through that body, how can we be a member of a church without participating actively in the work it is doing? This takes many forms, of course; some are hands, some are feet, some are the appendix and we´re not really sure why they´re there... but the body is active in extending God´s grace to this world in tangible and intangible ways. Why aren´t we more active in this work?

This was disorganized and wordy and stream of consciousness-esque... for that I apologize. Please feel free to disagree, develop these thoughts into something more coherent, etc.

Tomorrow I head out on a sort of whirlwind tour of David´s programs with some gringos from a church in Tennessee that sponsors a lot of David´s programs, and I won´t be back till Thursday. All the best until then. Hope you´re all doing well.