Lesson #1:
Tuesday's post talked about getting out of one's comfort zone. We experienced that this weekend. Our friend Laura from church asked if George and I would help her lead singing at the English service today. "Help" meaning sing behind microphones like members of a praise team. We both like singing but neither of us have any experience with leading people in worship. We agreed to sing with her, although somewhat reluctantly.
Friday night we spent a couple of hours at church practicing with Laura and a guitarist from church. He was not familiar with any of the four songs we had chosen and we didn't have music so he tried his best to listen and was pretty quick to catch on to a couple of the songs. So, we ended practice feeling OK but still somewhat nervous about not only singing in front of people but now having to sing a cappella for some of the songs.
We were asked if we could put the song lyrics on a Power Point presentation for the projector so I worked on that yesterday. When we got to church today, we found out that due to a technical difficulty the Power Point presentation with lyrics was not compatible with their projection system so we had no lyrics for people to see! After a few frantic minutes talking with Laura about what to do, we decided to just go ahead and sing the songs we had planned even though three of them were new and it would mean people would just have to listen to us sing.....we were planning on people singing WITH us not just listening to us! It was definitely outside my comfort zone but it actually went OK and I really appreciated the pastor's comments afterwards because he knew we were feeling out of our element: "If you want to put on a show you can go to Vegas. If you want to worship remember that God looks at the heart...it doesn't matter if you sing perfectly or not."
Lesson #2:
Our whole family was excited for a cooking lesson today! We have enjoyed some delicious empanadas at church from a family who has sold them after services trying to raise funds for a church retreat. Our friend Laura arranged a cooking lesson with the woman for after the service today. Last week Sunday we went over all the details and I had my list of ingredients to buy. Friday night we confirmed it all with the woman who was also at church when we were practicing. Yesterday, I bought all the ingredients.
Today, we arrive at church with all the stuff and the woman says she's too busy getting things ready for a special afternoon service at church so it wasn't going to work to stay and make empanadas together after the morning service. The planner in me wanted to ask, "didn't you know about your other commitment last Sunday (which I know she did)?"...or again on Friday night when we confirmed? Laura said she's had many similar experiences in her 10 years here....from our cultural viewpoint we'd rather just get told up front if there's a conflict and it's not going to work but maybe that seems too rude in others' eyes. We're learning the importance of flexibility!
It ended up being the sunniest day we've had in a week so since we had an unexpected free afternoon we spent a couple of fun hours at the beach - something we haven't done in a number of weeks so we still ended up having some fun family time after church (although a disappointing evening watching the Tigers).
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