Friday, September 17, 2010

Santa Rita Kekchi Service

Last night we had a special service just for our Kekchi people in Santa Rita. The village is about 60% Kekchi, but a greater percentage of them speak Spanish than the rest of the Kekchi in Petén. Because of this we usually have around 20 Kekchi kids at Shelley's Bible Study, 10-15 teenagers and 10 Kekchi adults at Jimmy's Bible Study. Most of the adults though are Kekchi men because it is usually the women who don't speak Spanish. There are plenty of men too who struggle with Spanish enough to not come to the Bible Studies and there are several kids who don't understand a word of what we're saying, but they still like to see the pictures of the stories and do the crafts.

Even for those who do understand Spanish, we wanted to have a clear presentation of the Gospel in their heart language where it will mean more to them. So Domingo and José came last night to help us. All faces lit up when I introduced them and said, "Now the rest of the service will only be in Kekchi." Then when they heard José start to speak in Kekchi you could here them giggling with delight and looking at each other and smiling.

José sang a hymn in Kekchi, and the people were tickled with it too. He has a wonderful bellowing voice. We will have to record it one time. Then Domingo got up and gave a short, clear presentation of the Gospel, that Jesus is the Way, Truth and Light and the only way to heaven. There were several of our spanish-only crowd there, so he translated enough so they would know what he was talking about. I thought it was interesting that our Spanish people identify themselves so strongly with the Bible study that they were willing to sit through an hour long movie in Kekchi in order not to miss anything! For almost all of the Kekchi there it was the first time to hear about Salvation in their language.

We then watched a 76 minute video called "Hope" which we've talked about before in that it shows God's plan from Creation to the Resurrection. We only have 40 chairs, but with kids sitting on the floor we had 50 people under the roof sitting down. About 10 minutes into the video I looked outside and there were just as many outside watching as there were inside sitting down. When the movie finished, everybody scattered except those old men that always help me pick up chairs.

We were thrilled to see so many people come out. Please pray that God will give us more opportunities to follow up and continue to work with these people despite the language barrier. Hopefully soon we'll be able to share personally God's plan in Kekchi.

1 comment:

  1. It is so neat that Jose & Domingo were there to do that. I can just imagine some of their expressions!

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...