This past weekend was a long weekend for us. Not because it felt long (although at times it did!), but because Matt had Monday off of work for a local holiday. It was Whit Monday or Pentecost Monday which is a holiday celebrated the day after Pentecost (40 days after Easter).
On Saturday we went to the large Carrefour and got some groceries. I was able to find a few more things that we needed, but still having a hard time finding some stuff. We are going to have to get used to the fact that things are more expensive here and budget for it.
Saturday afternoon we took a long walk to a bigger local park. We were not there long because a few minutes after we got there Elijah had to use the bathroom and of course there was nothing around, so we took the long walk back home.
Before I talk about the Church that we tried out on Sunday, I am going to give you a little information. For a Protestant there are about 7 places you can attend Church (not necessarily a Church building) that have an English speaking service. One service starts at 9am, one starts at 11:30am, one starts at 12:30 pm, one starts at 9:45am, one starts at 10:30am and several are at 6pm. There appears to be one Synagogue for the Jewish, one for Jehovah's Witnesses and one for Latter Day Saints. There were also several listed that we could not find the address for or any information on. Matt and I like to research places as much as we can to get a feel of them before we go in so we had spent Saturday night researching. None of the Churches are closer than 15 minutes without traffic (and you will most likely have some traffic). It would also appear that none of the Churches have Sunday School, just a worship service.
Sunday we tried out our first church. I am not going to give the name of the Church and I am going to lay out facts and not put too much of my actual thoughts here, as to not offend anyone who might read this. Sunday started out a little rocky. We are not the most outgoing of people and we were not really looking forward to trying a new Church. (just being honest). It had been a tough week and we would have loved to have just stayed in bed. However, we got up and got ready to go. Elijah was a bit cranky because he doesn't like unknown things. We headed out to Matt's car at the time we thought we should leave, to allow time to get there and find the place. Once we got in the car Matt put in the address in his GPS and it said "Can not reach destination by car, please use a different form of transportation." What?! What does that even mean. We didn't have to cross water, so we were not sure it was talking about. So, he tried again and tried to find a street near that, not having much luck. I took out my US phone which happens to have Navigation on it and plugged in the address...no problem, we set out on our journey. I was even more thankful that we had switched cell phone carriers and I had a usable phone with me. It got us to the street we needed and we got out and walked. It was on a side street that cars couldn't park on (which I guess is why it said we couldn't get there by car), on the 7th floor of the building.
We found it without too much trouble and headed up. Music was already playing so we thought we were late. We walked in and people were standing around and chatting (we were glad we were not late). A lady came up and greeted us and thanked us for taking time out of our vacation to join them for service. We informed her that we were not on vacation, that we had moved here. We sat on the back row of chairs (we never sit on the back). A few minutes later the Pastor came up and shook hands and said "Thanks for taking time out of your holiday to visit with us." Which, we also informed him that we were not on holiday. He then introduced himself, said he was from the Assembly of God Church and asked what we were doing here. When Matt told him he worked for the Embassy he called over a guy who worked in the Embassy and introduced him to Matt. We found out a little later the lady who introduced herself was the Pastor's wife.
As we were waiting on the service to start we were reading the bulletin which said "this Church is a Spirit-filled church. You may see spiritual gifts in operation as described in 1 Corinthians 12. These gifts will be explained as they occur." The bulletin also had the main points of the sermon and some smaller points as well.
The service started the way we are used to, we stood and sang Contemporary Christian songs that we have sung in other Churches and are on the radio. There was prayer and then they anointed people who had a need and then prayed again. After that, the Pastor got up and said his son would be preaching that morning, that he is finishing up seminary soon. He said his son was Italian and available...yes ladies, he is available to a good Christian lady who believes. I will say that struck me odd.
After the prayer all the kids got up to leave the service and the Pastor's wife came up and asked if Elijah wanted to go with the kids. Elijah was shaking his head "no" and the lady said "Well, I will say we have a bunch of refugee kids so he may not want to go with them." This really bothered me. I felt like it was an unnecessary comment. A kid is a kid to a kid. They may not speak the same language, or even have the same life experiences, but a kid looks at a kid and sees a kid. That's the way it should be and they don't need us putting any prejudices or preconceived ideas on them. Maybe I just don't have the right perspective on that, so feel free to enlighten me.
His son got up, prayed, then preached his sermon. It was a pretty good sermon, but he did seem to be making a point, in a round about way, that if you were not Christian that your life would be harder than the Christians, you would have more problems and stuff. Which seemed on the flip side to say if you were a Christian your life would be easier. Which is simply not true.
As the service concluded the worship team got back up to lead singing again (which we are used to) and sang the exact same songs as they sang when the service started. (Not used to that).
After we had walked out Elijah said "Not that one." He couldn't specifically say what he didn't like about it, but he didn't feel like it was the one we should be attending.
Some observations from this Church: we had assumed that because it was an English speaking Church that there would be a good amount of Americans. We were wrong. In a room of say 60-80 people, there was maybe 10 Americans. I will point out here that we are not looking for an all-American church. We have no desire to go to a Church where everybody is just like us. In our previous posts we have been blessed with being in a Church that had a mix of people, from many different places and that is what we expect here. However, we do not want to the be the only American family in a Church.
The second observation: there were several people who had headsets and people translating the English service to their language, which I thought was great.
We headed home from Church and several streets were closed and it took us about 45 minutes to get home. We ate a quick lunch, gathered some snacks and headed to Avlaki Beach in Porto Rafti, where we were meeting some friends. We had to pay to get on this particular beach, but we had stopped at the free beach right before this one, and were not impressed. The view was nice, but there was no sand, it was all gravel, there was no restroom, you had to go to the café across the street. So, when we got to Avlaki Beach and had to pay, we were more willing, seeing as how there was sand, beach chairs and umbrellas, bathrooms, changing areas, showers where you could rinse the sand off, and a life guard. The view was amazing and we had a great time.
Like I said at the beginning of the post, Monday was a local holiday. We decided we would hang out around our apartment and have some family time. The kiddos played all morning with Legos and Matt and I decided to move some furniture around since they were occupied. We have two carpet pieces in our apartment and we decided to move one to our room and the other to the dining room side and make it a playroom for the kids. What we hadn't anticipated was once we moved the first carpet there was a ton of pet hair and the floor was nasty, resulting in a lot of deep cleaning, which made everything take longer. We finally finished what we had started around 3pm. Work in progress...
We were wiped out when we finished organizing everything. We had promised the kids that we would play with them when we finished, they had been complaining (especially Kayla) that we have been too busy to do anything with them (taking them places apparently doesn't count). So, we sat down to play a few games with them. They couldn't agree on what they wanted to play so we told them to each pick a game and then we would play each one. We played Elijah's first and then when it was time to play Kayla's he threw a fit. They had been picking at each other through the first whole game. He finally decided he would play her game and they picked and fought all the way through it. By the time we were done I was way overtired and frustrated. I love spending time with the kids and I love having family time, but there are times when you wonder why you bothered. That was how I was feeling at this particular moment. They have been fighting like crazy ever since they had to share a room, and now that they are finally in their own space, it still hasn't calmed down. We decided to order pizza and try to have an easier evening.
It came and we had also decided to watch a movie...Matt and I picked a movie we wanted to watch (Enchanted) and the kids watched with us. The food was very different from what we are used to, which made Elijah pretty unhappy. The rest of us adapted and dealt with it. When the movie was over the kids showered and we put them to bed. It was later than it usually is and I was more than ready for some peace and quiet. If I had been smart I would have walked in the afternoon, getting a little time for myself.
I am thankful for beautiful sunsets and the opportunity to start over each day. I snapped this picture at the end of Monday, to remind myself of God's beauty. Even when we are aggravated and tired there is still beauty around us. We need to remember to look beyond ourselves to see it.
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