Words cannot describe our time in Cobrex, Brazil at Wesleyana Methodist Church. Our time there officially began back in Itatiaia, our previous ministry point 3 hours away. Pastor Marcos from Cobrex traveled all the way to Itatiaia for a half hour visit, just because he was so keen on having our team come to his church. Our whole team spent time in prayer at separate ministry points and we both felt the need to be separated again in Rio. So on we went, the yellow team to Wesleyana Church.
We were told that some individuals in the church could speak some English, but on arrival we were shocked to find no one understood us. Some made the decision to download translators on their phones, while others stuck to the wonderful game of charades.
Since none of us could really understand what was going on most of the time, many things were lost in translation. The first night alone, we ended up going out for pizza with half the church congregation at 1am like it was the most normal thing to do on a Sunday night/ Monday morning. The rest of our time there looked quite similar in terms of food, we didn't go hungry that is for sure. The first day we were given the impression we were making our own food like any other place, but were clearly mislead when Pastor Marcos showed up with breakfast after we already ate. That day alone we ate about 6 meals due to miscommunication and the generosity of the church members.
Our ministry work here was short, much to our dismay. We did a 2 hour message for the congregation on missions work (which we had a translator for). Pastor Marcos wanted to stir up the hearts of the congregation for missions work, so we created a new drama to the song The Anthem by Jesus Culture to demonstrate this. We also each shared our testimonies on how we ended up with Global Challenge.
Besides this, our time was spent with the church members spoiling us with food, gifts and a tour of Rio de Janeiro.
We didn't know what to do with everything, and all of us felt overwhelmed by the amount of love and appreciation we had received for doing basically (what we thought was) nothing. This was actually the cool thing though, because this is where Jesus really snuck up on us. As we spent so much time wondering what there was that we could do or where we could go, God was really just teaching us to be.
Something Pastor Marcos told us the last day we were there, "I love speaking to people about Jesus... Sometimes I use words." We realized then that our presence alone spoke for itself. During our time there, we became aware and sensitive to even the smallest of actions we made, not just because of the language barrier, but also to become a good ambassador for Christ simply by our actions. We really learned that we don't really have to do anything necessarily, but our actions speak for us when we can't speak for ourselves.
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