Yesterday, late afternoon, when it should have still been sunny, it suddenly got dark. Street lights started to flicker on. And then it started to rain.
And hail.
The first major storm of the year (as we’re just coming out of rainy season) was the kind of a storm you don’t see every year. Rain and hail, then rain, then hail, then rain, then hail, and on and on it went.
The water covered the street, and then started pouring over the curb. And then it started pouring into people’s houses.
As for us, the garbage can outside started to float, then tipped over. The leaks in the roof started. And water started to stream across our kitchen floor.
So the rest of the evening was full of moving things, putting out buckets and towels to catch the drips, mopping, and watching the doors to make sure the water didn’t get high enough to start coming in from there. Thankfully, it never did.
A lot of people had it far worse than us. Other than the flooding itself, in a lot of areas traffic comes to a standstill, and people trying to get home from work are stuck for hours.
We’re thankful for a number of things.
First, that we were home. It would have been a lot messier if we’d been away.
Also, we’re thankful that we have water in our taps and electricity. Yes, in these situations we do sometimes lose one or both of those things. The lights flickered quite a bit, but never actually went out. So we’re thankful for all the many people in our community that work hard to make sure that these things work and keep working.
So this morning we’re washing some of the towels and rags, sweeping up, and opening windows to try to get everything dried out. But it’s still pretty moist outside, and still cloudy, so it may take a while!
Ten years ago today, first thing on a Monday morning, Shari went with Hannah to her school, where they both did a special presentation to the class about – chocolate!
If you’ve ever been involved in planning a Sunday service, you may have noticed that, once in a while, a theme emerges in the service that you weren’t really planning on. Or, maybe the songs fit with the sermon in a very unexpected way.
“The Best Bible Study Tool” translated version of my Dad’s booklet
Or, sometimes in the Bible studies and conversations that are going on in a local church, it starts to look like God really wants to emphasize certain things, even though you weren’t planning to focus on them.
One of the themes that has been emerging over the last little while in our church here in Ixtapaluca Mexico is our personal study of the Bible.
Our hermeneutics course is ending this week, but one of the last lessons had some practical tips for personal devotions. It turned out that personal devotions was also the theme of the Bible study that week, followed by how to understand the Bible (this past Saturday) and how to study the Bible (this coming Saturday).
My Dad used and developed a tool for his personal devotions called the Bible Card System, which I thought would be useful for the hermeneutics class. So they’ve been trying it out, and I will likely introduce it to our Bible study group and the rest of the church as well. (If you’re interested, you can read about it in English or in Spanish now.)
Of course we continue to dive into Bible study in general at church. On Sunday we continued our biblical anthropology with the theme of Family – an interesting one as we enter into a season with Children’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day (we celebrated the first one at the service yesterday). This study was all about marriage and gender among other things (and I think the adults especially wanted a few more hours to talk about it! – issues of gender, marriage, family and sexuality are of course pretty practical, especially here in 2021!).
By the way, it was a fun service (although rather eclectic!). Oscar led the service and had some special things for the kids. After the service, we had some photos of children or adults when they were younger, and had to guess who they were (not hard with Hannah and Nathanael – especially that picture of Hannah with a snowman!). Shari made up some gift bags for the kids, and a GIANT COOKIE!
Decorations up for Children’s Day on Sunday morning
But back to the sermon topic. We’re planning to do one anthropology study a month, and so far it feels like a year-long look at Genesis 1-3. You can just go deeper and deeper into those chapters, and you keep discovering more! But this week, unexpectedly, I think that a big theme that struck me was the theme of identity, and where our identity comes from.
Just to keep things interesting, this Sunday in our study of Romans we arrive at Romans 13. Ah yes, this chapter has been the source of a lot of discussion, studies and sermons in the past few months! So although we didn’t pick it because of recent world events, you can bet we’ll be talking about some of them. (In case you’re wondering where I’m coming down on some of these issues – well, I’m still studying! Maybe I’ll write some posts about it.)
I think we’ve been learning some practical things from one another as we study God’s Word. May we put it into practise in the challenging days ahead!
It’s been quite the busy few weeks, that’s for sure! If you would like to catch up on some highlights, here are the five most popular posts here at Finding direction, in chronological order. The most popular in bold:
A Little Windy (video) – Yes, it does tend to get windier as the Sunday morning service progresses!
Last week we took a long journey, although we ended up in the same state we started in (our home state), and took a few days off.
Not much to say about that at the moment, except that it was a nice change. However, I did want to share this video with you.
While we were out of the city, I took several walks in the forest. There was one sound in particular that I noticed – it sounds like it might be birds, but maybe you can tell me. The sound you’re looking for is heard clearly three times in this short video. It lasts a few seconds, and gets higher and higher in pitch. What is it?
