Church and Cicaks

The church I am attending is a Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. (You may or may not know that A.W. Tozer preached at a CMA church for many years. That was just a freebie.☺) The church is called the Gereja Kemah Injil Indonesia. A word-for-word translation is: Church Tabernacle Gospel Indonesia. A less literal translation might be Gospel Tabernacle Church of Indonesia. Today five young adults were baptized. That makes a total of 12 baptisms in the month of September.

It is a fairly large congregation and has many similarities to church services in the U.S. However, the offering is a distinctly cultural experience. Upon entering the church, we are given three offering envelopes. Printed on the envelopes are specific directions for the proper way of inserting one’s money into the offering bags: don’t fold, no coins, no torn or ragged money, etc. At offering time three bags are passed; each one for a different ministry of the church. But on the last Sunday of the month, everyone processes to the front of the church and deposits their offering into two boxes. Part of the purpose of the envelopes is to prevent embarrassment when someone can contribute only a small amount or nothing at all. After a prayer and many announcements the third offering is taken up but in the regular way with an offering bag being passed around. I guess the three bags keep the accounting simple. Or maybe not. ☺

Since I last wrote about the smoke problem, it had improved a little bit – at least here in Tarakan. But this week we have slowly seen more smoke coming in from the south and today (Sunday, September 27) it is so bad again that I cannot see the ocean from my porch. There is a thick haze over the town. The rainy season will help with the smoke but no one can predict when the rainy season will start. They say El Nino has messed things up and it isn’t as easy to predict as in the past. The smoke problem isn’t anywhere as bad as in Palangkaraya. Three hundred fifty people were admitted into the hospital there in one week due to health issues related to smoke.

I had a cicak (cheechahk – gecko) wriggle out of the trash can as I dropped something in there today. That isn’t the first time that has happened. I never fail to jump back twenty feet. If I just had warning about their whereabouts, I wouldn’t be so squeamish. It’s just the suddenness of their appearance and the way they swiftly wriggle away that always startles me. I have to keep repeating, “They are good critters. They eat other insects. They are good critters. They are good critters.”

I also had a toad in my kitchen last week. Carter – my sixth grader – loves bugs, spiders, snakes, frogs, toads… you get the idea. He caught a toad, and placed him in a gallon jug with grass, a rock and some water to make him comfortable. Carter left the jar in the hallway of the school (the school is in the basement of my house). He assured me it couldn’t escape. So the next morning I had a toad in my kitchen. Somehow I managed to shoo him out. When I went down to get ready for school, Carter’s toad was not in its jar. I came to the conclusion that it had to be the toad that was upstairs in my kitchen. But how did that thing get upstairs? The only possible way would have been to hop up the stairs and then on into the kitchen. That is a long and toilsome trip for a toad. ☺ Moral: Keep a tight lid on your pets!!!!