Crammed Van

On Good Friday, Roger asked me to preach at a nearby church that they have recently started. The people are meeting in a little garage. They have grown to about 25 or 30 people. Well, I was nervous to preach because I´m not fluent in Spanish yet, and Roger isn´t fluent in English either. I wasn´t sure how we were going to pull this off. We came up with an idea that I would write my sermon in English, then we would sit down together and between the both of us, we would write out a Spanish translation. Then I would read the first sentence, and he would read his sentence back and forth. This was going to be interesting. That night, Roger picked up several people from his church who wanted to go along with us to the service. The van was full. It was an eight passenger van and there was maybe 18 of us crammed together. Well, the service went great. God came and met with us in that garage as we sang and testified. It was very refreshing. Then it was my turn to preach. I gave a greeting in Spanish as best I could and then preached. It worked pretty well, except for a few times Roger was reading lines ahead of my lines, but we got it together. At the end of the message we asked if anyone wanted to pray. Two people came forward to pray. A man came forward to rededicate his life to Christ, and also the lady who owned the garage where we were meeting wanted to pray. God helped both of them that night. It was exciting. This was the very first time this lady had ever prayed to accept Christ as her Saviour. She is a widow lady who has been coming to the services but had never prayed until that night. Thank the Lord for a brand new soul!! Pray for her, her name is Estella.

After the service we had more people to take home then what had come with us. We weren´t sure how we were going to get them home. One by one they got in the van, when it was all said and done, there were 25 of us and Hannah was sitting on my lap on the front seat. It was hilarious. Off we went, laughing and having a good time. On the way home we had to pass a toll booth and just on the other side was a police check point. I thought for sure we were going to get in big time trouble, sure enough the police officer waved us over to the side of the road. There we sat, people on top of people, hot as ever and this police officer wants to talk to Roger. Well, as we waited the people in the back of the van start singing, they were singing so loud Roger could hardly hear what the officer was saying. Hannah and I just sat there and laughed. We couldn´t believe this. Finally after chatting with the officer for several minutes Roger gets back in the van and away we go. We came close to getting a fine. The officer said that Roger´s tail lights were broken and we had too many people in the van, he wanted some money. Roger had asked to speak to the officer´s boss and maybe explain the situation, well once the officer knew Roger wasn´t about to pay this guy off he let us go. To say the least, it was a very memorable ride home.