Just some unrelated stories....

Last week I was in a small fender-bender (or the Brazilian equivalent...) with one of my friends. Fortunately no one was hurt other than the car, and I got to spend a good, quality, four hour period sitting on the sidewalk with my friends as we waited for the highly efficient police force to arrive and write the report. When they did, one of the officers in particular was a really nice guy who tried to lighten the mood by joking around with us as he took our statements about what had happened. When he figured out I was American he got really excited and started speaking English, so, naturally, per LST/missionary protocol, I invited him to come study with me, never actually dreaming that he would ever do it. Imagine my surprise when a few days later he called my cell phone and said "Hi, I'm the police man who was after your friend, I'm calling about the English classes," and I laughed at him because I thought it was Roberto playing a joke on me. :) I'm really excited, though, because of all the taxi drivers, waiters, salespeople, etc I've blindly invited to participate in LST, Felix the Cop might acutally be the first one to ever have followed through. Paul encourages us in Colossians to make the most of every opportunity, does he not? Even your routine fender bender can be an opportunity for evangelism. Who knew?

Tonight we had the third and final night of a three-week-long competition among the young people at church. The competition has involved Bible trivia, sports, skits, jokes, impersonations, silly tasks, music, etc. When Roberto and Osmildo were first planning the competition, I playfully whined that they needed to include a category for English so that Lacy and I could fully participate. Then they actually did. So tonight was my shining moment, I had the chance to go up there in front of everyone, in the final event of the competition, and answer computer-generated questions about English. Questions so easy that the non-English speakers were getting some of them right. English so not hard that the Brazilian guy who competed in the English category for the other team scored 50,000 points by getting like 10 questions in a row right. So there I am, headphones on, heart pounding because I can hear my team cheering for me, and feeling a bit like I'm in the hotseat facing Regis on Millionaire. So then it comes, the 5000-point question. And I totally got it wrong. Yes, that's right. I got the fifth question wrong and won my team a measely 500 points. It was not one of my prouder moments...