This morning I saw a grown man cry. He stands about 5 foot tall, has dark tan skin, sings worship songs really loudly, and is most often found with a huge grin on his face. But not today. The rising of this sun marked the last time he would be joining our church...at least for a while. His name is Marco, his ethnicity is Filipino, and his most recent life event was the non-renewal of his contract as a gondolier at the Venetian Macao. Now, people lose jobs all the time, but for Marco this means going back to the Philippines-- a place with limited economic opportunity and an abundance of hardship. I've read statistics that say 20-25% of children in the Philippines are malnourished...that's not just from the ones that ares mistreated. People are legitimately poor and hurting. I guess for the American readers, you could parallel Marco to a legal Mexican immigrant to the U.S. He has left his family in the Philippines with the hope to provide them a better life. The good news about this transition is that he will get to be with family again. The bad news is the fear of what is next and how he will support this family he is now near to. Our church prayed over him at the end of service, and one man came out with an amazing prayer. He prayed based on the promise in the Bible that our tears of sadness would be turned to tears of joy, and that this situation of weakness would become one of abundance. So often, I find it's easy for us to underestimate God's amazing ability to skip rocks. What I mean by that is that when God 'throws' (moves) us, He has the talent of having us touch many different lives along the way to our final resting place. We don't realize it sometimes; we just see ourselves being launched and freak out that things are now not as they were before. But somehow God has us skim the surface in contact just enough that it causes multiple ripples that we probably never acknowledged. So God makes the most of every time He moves us in ways we may never notice. Who knows what nurse or fellow patient needed to overhear something in the hallway from my grandfather's hospital room? Or maybe it wasn't there at all...maybe it was something I said to someone about it on this side of the world? Only God knows at this point. Remember, no man is an island. In fact, that's in part what today's message was on. We covered the purpose of the church and the importance of not being ethnocentric. Ethnocentrism is the belief that ones own ethnicity, culture, race, etc. is better than any other. When Christ came, He made the Jews and Gentiles both equal in the eyes of God in terms of access to their Creator and salvation. It's important that in all our differences, we remember our focus-in-common on eternity with Christ. It's such a joy and a unique experience to lift up our God's name in worship with an assortment of various accents from around the world and to have the opportunity to learn from them at the same time.
This morning, I had such an experience learning from a sweet lady named Tuula. She's from Finland, married to an Asian (I think he's from China), lived in Australia for over 10 years, lived in the UK, and now is in Macau. Needless to say, she has quite the book if experiences. She was telling me about naming her children something that an Anglo Saxon could pronounce, and about how they have name days that are similar to birthdays. I think this was something they celebrate in Finland. My favorite part of her sharing with me before church was about a dream she had of God leading her somewhere and her saying with a smile just like a line from a movie, "I have unfinished business." Go get it, girl!
On the way home from church today, I saw a huge crowd surrounding more than one Catholic church. Is today some sort of special celebration? I know that it's the first Sunday of Lenten season, but I'm interested to find out what all the excitement was about. They even had the police band with their instruments standing outside. Seen here:
No comments:
Post a Comment