FRIDAY - Rebecca, whose blog Renaissance is one of my favorites, had a post recently with a photo of a fruit wasp (BTW, she takes the most amazing photos! And since she lives in the country they are particularly wonderful. And her posts are SO refreshingly self-revealing and centered on her faith). Anyway, I'd never seen a fruit wasp in person and was astounded at how large it was. Fast forward 3 days to Friday, and as we were starting the mass at the small community where our team goes to minister, a whole slew of these things showed up! HUGE, I tell you! Happily, nobody got stung, at least not during mass, although one boy had a big bump on the back of his head from having been stung earlier.
SATURDAY - I had suggested to the team (above) that we pray a novena together for the people in the small communities served by our church. For those of you not familiar with novenas, here's a post I just did about them. These communities have so little in the way of spiritual resources, and although there are many needs it seems that the people in the communities don't see themselves as being capable of meeting any of them. Thus the need for a novena to implore God to provide what these communities don't currently have, so that His love can be spread abroad.
Anyhow, I spoke with Padre about this and he spoke with the two nuns who head up the team, and they asked me to find an appropriate novena on the web that we could use. After much searching, I realized that I'd have to put something together using several existing novenas, and that's what I spent most of the day doing on Saturday. At the end of the day the Pirate suggested that we go to our favorite restaurant for dinner, which we did, and when we got home at 8:00pm we set the clocks back (in Mexico Daylight Savings time changed this weekend). That was unfortunate because we were both exhausted and wanted to go to bed, but we knew we'd have to stay awake until at least 9:30 (Standard Time) or we'd be waking up at 4:00am. So we got onto Youtube and watched a bunch of clips and documentary TV shows in spanish until our brains felt like they were made up of noodles, and we gave up and went to bed.
SUNDAY - was a "cooking with Padre" day with a twist. Padre didn't cook up one of his recipes because he was SUPER busy this weekend (a quinceañera in one of the outlying communities, a wedding back here in town, and a regular evening mass yesterday, plus baptisms after the noon mass today). So I found a great recipe for chile rellenos on TV Once (pronounced own-say, which means eleven). This is a PBS-type channel run by one of the big universities in mainland Mexico, and I discovered a cooking series on it, with all the recipes available on its website (in spanish of course). Rather than give you the details on this post, I'll do a separate post tomorrow with the recipe in english. It's quite simple, and wickedly delicious (bacon is involved!). But just so there's at least one picture to this post, here are Padre and the Pirate talking about church stuff.
Bendiciones to you, dear readers!
We are saying a Novena here in Mass for our country's leaders. Love your stories of faith!
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