I rode to church with a chicken today.

Seriously...well most of the way.

I went to a small Honduran church today.  It was awesome, and I think I may have found my church home while I'm down here.  On the way there, about a kilometer or so from the Ranch, we stopped to pick up a family [mother, three kids, and a granddaughter].  About another kilometer or two down the dirt road we stopped by a group of people, and one woman came up with a plastic bag (it was double bagged actually)...and a chicken head poking out.  This was a live chicken.  It moved and it clucked.  She handed it through the window to one of the house moms who was riding in the van with us...and we kept going.  With the chicken.  I was informed (upon questioning Melody) that this particular house mom spends Sunday with her family back in Teguc, and this isn't the first time she's gone there with a chicken.  It definitely was a first for me.

The church, as stated, was small and very welcoming. We weren't even meeting in a church building, it's in a small building that houses a kind of corner mini-grocery store (pulpería) where they sell pop and snacks downstairs, and we were in a large-ish room upstairs that had other rooms coming off one end of it.  They looked kind of like apartments or offices, I couldn't tell.  We were singing songs with lyrics off of an overhead projector (the ones that require clear transparancies), and sitting in plastic chairs.  But the people are amazing, and in conversations and in the preaching there is a definite sense of God's presence there.  I was able to understand some of what the pastor was saying, and what I didn't pick up on, Luis translated.  [He translated the whole thing, I just sometimes paid attention to him, and sometimes paid attention to the pastor.]

Afterward was the weekly stop at the mall for lunch and shopping.  Conversation was good, shopping is tiring...and we had some fun getting back.  It's been raining a bit more lately (it's raining as I type)...and the dirt road gets a little more eroded, a little more slippery and the stream crossing the dirt road gets a little higher it seems each time we travel it.  I was a little concerned about us making it across (obviously we did).  There was concern about making it up one particular hill as well (which we did...barely...last night it took us 4 tries to get up that hill!).  For some reason, a day in the city exhausts me.

Oh, last night...yeah.  Last night we went out for sushi to celebrate Kim's birthday.  It was a lot of fun, and the sushi place was really good.  It never occured to me I'd be going out for sushi in Honduras, but why not.  The food was excellent, and food and drink together cost $10 (almost exactly...a little bit over).  You can spend more than that in fast food places...I have spent more than that in fast food places.  So all around a good evening, and if the drive back was a little...interesting...I have complete confidence in Andrew's ability to drive...or at least I tell myself that...since he hasn't given me a reason to doubt yet.

School starts tomorrow, so as it's already 9:30, I'm heading to bed.  I'm sure I'll write more about it later...provided the storm doesn't cut out the power yet again. :-)