Nicaragua Day Two Alabama Tornadoes Plus Four

Awoke with Alabama still on my mind.

I am trying to focus on where I am and what I am doing. However my thoughts and prayers continue to linger on my friends and family back in Bama. Please pray and help where you can.

So back to our regularly scheduled program.

I am in Nicaragua. I keep having to tell myself that. Today I got the honor and the privilege to preach to Christ's body here in Esteli. Melvin, a very humorous member of our translating team, translated as I preached this morning. I loved it. It was a bit unnerving at the beginning trying to establish a point of contact with a culture I am so foreign to. So, as I usually do back home, I used sports. Dennis Martinez was a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians from 1994-1997, he also has a stadium named after him here in Nicaragua. So, I explained that we have common ground in that we both have cheered for this famous Nicaraguan.I told them of my life before Christ and then told them that I repented of my unbelief and trusted Jesus when I was a senior in High School. I told them that I did not come all the way to Nicaragua to talk about me or Dennis Martinez. I came to talk about Jesus. So, I then preached six of Jesus' "I am" statements from the gospel of John. It was fun and I hope that God was glorified. I only spoke for twenty minutes. They had allotted us one hour. There were no worries though, as the pastor cam and filled up the remaining time, as pastor's are known to do. Pastor Miguel preached for 15 minutes from Genesis 12. I have no idea what he preached on other than he said "familia" a bunch of times.

The rest of the church service was fun and confusing all at once. The congregation was lead in songs by several young ladies and then the children came and sang a song. There were scripture readings intermixed. The pastor played the keyboard while the young ladies led the song time. There was much standing and sitting and then standing and sitting as they stand to pray here. The congregation was about a quarter of men and the rest women. We got to witness a baby dedication. A young girl came forward with two ladies from the church with her little baby in a tiny red dress and red shoes. Her thick black hair was shooting everywhere. We noticed that the dude was not there.

We found out last night that some churches in a nearby village were told that the conference wasn't taken place this week and Cairo had to do some damage control as he called pastors and informed them that we were indeed a go this week. Sunday was fun and full.

I got to call home from an internet/communications cafe. I was never so grateful to spend 5 cords or 25 cents.

At dinner, Melvin said, "I am as full as a tick." He has spent some time in the Southern most United States. :)


Although he has also been to my birth state, OH-IO!



We traveled over to the church where we will hold the conference and set up the new screen that we will use to project our teaching slides. I will have to take a picture and post it for Vern stork. There is some Alabama/Nicaragua engineering going on with the screen.

The food has been delicioso! We do eat a lot of Gallo Pinto (beans and rice).

We learned of Osama Bin Laden's death on Facebook of all places.