Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Si?

Today I learned the hard way not to answer “Si” when you don’t know what someone is asking. I had plans to hang out with my fried Andrea today. We were going to go swimming in the afternoon, but she called me to tell me she had to cancel. But she asked me to accompany her to ____________ (words I didn’t understand). I asked her to repeat it, but to be honest, if you don’t know a word, it doesn’t matter how SLOW someone says something or how many TIMES they say it, you’re just not going to get it. So, I just say “si” and asked her when she was going to come by my house.

When she arrived at 4, it was raining like mad so I thought we might not go and just postpone it to another day, but she was insistent on going. She was also a bit dressed up which I found rather strange due to the fact that she’s never dressed up. I grabbed my flip flops (since it was raining, I’d rather not get my shoes all squishy) and rolled up my jeans a bit so they wouldn’t get wet and off we went. When the taxi driver asked her where we were going, she said a church. I was a little taken back because she’s not the church going type. We arrived at the church and everyone, and I mean EVERYONE was dressed up and wearing black. This should have been my first clue, but I just thought for some reason she wanted to go to mass. Picture it with me, ME in my jeans, flip flops and a rainjacket and everyone else in really nice clothes. To say the least, I felt a tad bit out of place.

Believe it or not, it got worse. I quickly realized that we weren’t just in ANY mass. We were at a funeral. Yep, that blank that I didn’t know what it meant was “funeral”. It was the funeral of her sister’s father-in-law. It only lasted about 30 minutes, thank the Lord, but then she motioned me to come up with her to give my condolences to the family and that’s where I decided that I’d let her go this one solo.

Once the funeral finished, I breathed a sigh of relief and asked if we were leaving and she said yes, we were off to the cemetery. After about fifteen minute, we arrived at the cemetery where they attempted to put the casket into the ground. When I saw “attempted,” I mean that it took a good 30 minutes because they couldn’t figure out how to get it in. So now you have a bunch of women yelling at a bunch of men as to HOW to best put this casket in the ground. If I wasn’t so mortified by the whole experience, I would have laughed out loud. After he was in place, they put all the flowers that were at the funeral all over his gravesite. Andrea had a flower in her hand, but she decided last minute she didn’t want to step up and put in on his grave, so she gave it to me. Now you have a gringa in jeans and flip flops holding a purplish rose that was meant for the dead man that she didn’t know.

Needless to say, God does not do things like this to me for nothing because on the way home Andrea began to disclose to me her family and their “religious” ties. It turns out the Andrea’s absent father is Mormon, her mother is Catholic and her brothers and sisters are Christians. The obvious question was, “What are you?” And she said she didn’t know… she was nothing. She began to ask me about me, “Are you religious?” And I got the joy of sharing with her that I didn’t like religion. That what I have is a relationship with God. When she asked me why I didn’t know the “prayers,” I got to explain to her that because of my relationship with God, I could talk to him like my Dad, my friend. That was the end of that conversation for the day, but I know that there will be more to come.

The other day, I felt like the Lord was asking me an open ended question… would you do anything for me? I think that He will be the only person I answer “si” to even if I don’t know what he’s really asking.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Jamie-
that makes for a hilarious story!!! God has a sense of humor and He used you all the same...humbling comes in many forms! Love you! Lynn