AMAZING GRACE - STARTING SIMPLE CHURCHES AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN CHILE
by John Fonner
[John Fonner is an NCI staff member in Chile. His focus is to establish a church planting movement among university students. This story took place on September 10, 2005.]
Saturdays don't get much better than the day we had today. Waking up to sunlight streaming through the curtains, drinking big cups of coffee, and jogging together got us off to a good start, but lunch was definitely the highlight.
Every Friday, a simple church meets in our cabana to pray and voluntarily fast the lunchtime meal, donating the money not spent on food to a little community piggy bank. Today, with the money saved, we went to the grocery store as a group and bought enough groceries for our group plus ten people to have sandwiches, chips, fruit, cookies, and something to drink.
From there, we took our goodies to the vegetable market by the river where there is a small community of very impoverished people, and offered lunch to anyone that looked hungry. It didn't take long to build a gathering. All of the homeless people there know each other, and so the first few that we found made sure their friends were there to enjoy the meal.
We spent almost two hours out by the river sitting in the sun with them and eating. It was great. In our group of students we had three Chileans, Marilyn and Nina representing Germany, and us. About half of the people we met spoke a version of Spanish that was completely unintelligible to all except the Chileans (one of our students frequently served as a translator.) Many of them still had the smell of alcohol on their breath. I think a couple weren't all there.
All, it seems, have gone through some great pain in their lives. Perhaps the most touching was Ruben, a small, elderlyman wearing a sweater, slacks, and a nice looking pair of black dress shoes.
Ruben offered us a beautiful, original poem in exchange for his sandwich, though most only understood bits and pieces of what he said. He told us a little about his story by first pulling up his slacks a little and revealing that his legs were prosthetics. He said that his legs had been crushed by a train, which one of the students told me is not too uncommon in Chile due to a lack of safety precautions around the tracks.
Ruben said he is still grateful to be alive. The greatest irony to his story is that he was a shoe maker by trade. He told us that the beautiful dress shoes on his feet were the work of his own hands. I think he has been out of work for a long time, but his shoes were still clean and polished.
Around the time we broke into the cookies, Marilyn and Nina broke into song...in German (apparently by request). Immediately after we were asked to sing in English. Our minds actually went blank at the unexpected request, but Erin thought of Amazing Grace after a few seconds.
When we started singing, everyone recognized the tune even though the words were different. Ruben actually grabbed his crutches from the wall behind him and struggled to his feet as a sign of respect for the song. By the end of the verse he had tears in his eyes.
I don't know what grace looks like through the eyes of someone who has been through so much pain and tragedy, but from looking at Ruben I think it must be deep and sweet. None of us left before he gave us a big hug and spoke a blessing over us.
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