Finding an end

I spent most of this morning at Santa Maria Virgen cutting wire. We had just a few more rebar structures to make, and we needed wire ties to hold them together, and we had a large coil of wire and a pair of wire cutters -- so I set to it to make wire ties. This involved playing out wire between my left and right hands to a length of six to eight inches, snipping off that length, and doing it again. And again. And again. Just the kind of solo, repetitive work that encourages thought and contemplation. At one point I even thought it was like saying the rosary, only with lengths of wire instead of beads.

Well, mostly. The iterations weren't always that smooth. The wire coil had been moved around a few times in the past few days, and it wasn't as neat as it had been at first. Some of the loops had overlapped each other, so from time to time the wire bound on itself. Instead of pulling smoothly, it would kink and get stuck and have to be unwound. And then I would need to put down the wire snips, get both hands into the coil, and shift things around until I had some loops free to snip.

More than once, when this happened, I had a hard time finding the end of the wire I'd been working on. All the loops in the coil looked just the same; the loop that had the end wasn't always distinguishable from its neighbors. In order to start snipping ties again, though, I needed the end of the wire. So from time to time I had to stop what I was doing and go and find the end.

In a way, I feel like that about our mission trip: I'm having a hard time finding the end. In one sense, of course, the end is obvious: this is our last day; tomorrow we leave our hotel early in the morning for the drive to San Pedro Sula and the flight to Houston and the flight to Dulles; and by late tomorrow evening we'll be home. The trip is ended because we only planned to come here so many days, and we have used up those days and that is the end. Plain and simple.

But in another sense this is hardly the end. This mission trip built on relationships that were formed a year ago, when last year's team began work at this site. And the relationships built up here this last week won't just cease to exist because the ten of us are going back to Virginia (and, for one of us, Iowa). We've done a lot of work on this site: if you look at "first day" and "last day" pictures, you'll see the evident difference. But it is still just a beginning, still only the foundation of what we all hope will be a beautiful and serviceable house for the church -- the people -- that meets here. The work of building this church has hardly ended today. And even when the building is finished, the work of building the church won't be at an end, as people are equipped for ministry and trained for service and raised up for prayer and praise. What we've done here, as proud of it as we may feel, is a very tiny drop in a very big bucket, one little set of steps in a very long pilgrimage of faithful people in the Way of the Lord. This is not the end; how could this be the end?

So that leaves me trying to find the end. What sense of conclusion can I give to this trip, to this particular set of experiences, within the larger flow of experiences that is and will be the life of this church congregation? What will round out this week as a whole, while also knowing there is so very much more to come?

One thought that comes to mind is to turn to another meaning of the word "end." "End" means not only conclusion or cessation, but also purpose, intention, the reason for which a thing is done. I look for an end, a purpose, for this trip, and it is not hard to find: God's purpose for us in the church is that we love one another as Jesus loves us, and that in the light of that love we see each other and ourselves as children of God, sharers in God's eternal act of Creation. When we gather as church and act out our love in concrete, serviceable, practical ways, we are fulfilling the purpose, the end, God shares with us. The end of our trip is that we have deepened relationships, and given love concrete form (literally!) in foundations and rebar and block, and learned a few words of each other's languages (including the language of the heart), and made something together that could not have been made the same had we been left apart.

That is the end of our mission trip here. And, of course, it is the beginning of our next steps in mission, too.

Skills

Much of our work at Santa Maria Virgen today required some degree of skill -- or at least practice -- that not all of our mission trip team had. There was mixing of concrete, and laying of block, and setting up of concrete forms, and several other tasks that Ted and Oakley and Lee B seemed to know well enough, and that seemed more than familiar to the Honduran workers among us, but were outside the skill sets of most of us American visitors. Tying rebar and digging trenches is easy to share with less skilled workers -- like us -- because it's hard to do it wrong. But I, at least, knew that I didn't want to get anywhere near laying block or pouring cement -- I could just imagine coming back in a year or two and finding that the church had fallen down because there was a flaw in the foundation that a well-meaning but unskilled gringo worker had left by accident! Even some of the simplest tasks -- like digging foundation trenches -- went much faster when the Hondurans did them. So Martha Erickson and Lee N and I did our best with pickaxe and shovel, digging a trench, until a couple of Honduran workers came up and took over from us, and finished the trench much more quickly than we would have done. And that was after they had taken over and finished the trench that Todd Doorenbos and his mother Pat had been working on. All in all, it turned into a day of jumping in to help with things we were able to help with, and waiting while others worked, watching for our moments of helpfulness to arrive.

At some point in the day it occurred to me that, although there wasn't much going on at the worksite that I was skilled enough to really help with, there were some other skills I had, that might even be relevant in this working context. I've not had any practice in laying block; but I have lots of practice in saying prayers. I could sit there, I realized, on the sidelines, ready to jump in with a simple task when it presented itself -- and all the while I could be praying for the church, and for the workers, and for the people the church would one day serve, and for our mission team members, and for the folks back home, and for the beauty of the mountainside, and for -- well, for anyone or anything that God knew needed the benefit of prayer. Workers in the Lord have many skills; and if my skills aren't in construction, well then I could use the skills with which I have been gifted.

I started off with a simple prayer phrase I've been using lately, a verse from the Book of Lamentations, "The loving-kindness of the Lord never ceases." I repeated it over and over in my mind, like a mantra, visualizing the loving-kindness of God as an infinite support for Dana, Margaret, Ted, Oakley, Victor, Concepcion, whoever my vision fell upon at that moment. After a while I switched to the Lord's Prayer, and began repeating that in my mind. We've been saying the Lord's Prayer as part of our Noonday Office every day before lunch -- in Spanish. And though I don't know Spanish well at all, I do know the Lord's Prayer very well, and I began to think about the meaning of the Prayer as it gets expressed in different words. I started to think about the words of the Prayer in Greek in the two Gospels where it appears, and how those meanings influence the prayer as we say it in contemporary English. I began to think about the history of the English words in the Prayer, how they've changed meanings over the years, and what subtle theological nuances are woven into such simple-sounding words today. As I recited the Prayer in my mind, I began to change the words, reflecting on how these nuances can be expressed in different phrasings -- Give us today our bread for today; Forgive us our sins; Forgive us our debts; Make up for what is lacking in us, as we make up for what is lacking in each other; Lead us not into temptation; Do not put us to the test; Do not bring us into times of trial and tribulation; Bring us out of evil; Now and always and always and always. The Prayer that Jesus taught us turned and flowed and opened in my mind, applying itself anew to the people and situations presented to me; and yet it was always the same prayer at the core. Over and over again, and with a delight of new discovery each time around.

And then, as I prayed, I would see that someone needed some masonry blocks for a new course of foundation wall they were laying, and I'd get up and bring them some blocks. Or two Honduran workers were about to mix some more concrete and would need water; and I'd get a bucket and go down the hill to where the water barrels had been delivered -- there is no plumbing at Santa Maria Virgen -- and I'd bring up a couple bucketfulls. Or a form was ready to have concrete poured, needing only the open end to be blocked; so I'd get some wet paper and dam up the end. Simple, silly, unskilled things I could do, while the skills of the skilled workers went to more important things. Over and above and through and around it all, I could do the thing that I was skilled at: I could pray.

So, little by little, task by task, skill by skill, the worksite at Santa Maria Virgen is being transformed. Already in the few days we've been here, the site looks different: more formed, more developed, more revealing of the potential of the church that will be here. Hard work and shared work and skilled work and prayer work, all together building up the People of God, the church.

Square

One of our tasks at Santa Maria Virgen today was making square grids that will serve as footings for extra-weight-bearing bits of the foundation structure. It seemed very straightforward when the Honduran construction boss showed us how to do it: take four pieces of rebar, lay them in a square, tie the ends together, lay three more pieces within the square to make a ladder, flip the whole thing over and lay in three more pieces to make a 5x5 grid, tie all the intersections together with wire twists. Simple as you please.

Except that, when we began to do it, it didn't seem so simple at all. The pieces didn't want to stay where we put them. Lifting the bars up from the ground ever so slightly to pass the wire twist around the pieces had a tendency to displace the other pieces. Twisting the wire, which we'd done with such skill and finesse on the rebar cages before, seemed to follow a different geometry altogether on the grids. I never did figure out what I was doing wrong; I just know that more often than not I'd twist a nice figure-8 and the second piece of rebar wouldn't be connected to it at all. Mystifying. When the one I'd been working on with Lee Beam and Margaret Pearson and Lee Nancarrow was finally finished, I stood it up -- and it wasn't square. It wasn't all that far off square, no. But it was definitely a parallelogram, not a real right-angle square. How was that going to serve as a proper footing?

Not to worry, said Lee B. A few taps of a hammer in a few well-chosen places, a bit of push applied in a corner, and the whole grid shifted into a much more passable square. It may not have been a Pythagorean ideal form, but it would certainly do the job of helping to hold up the church.

Thinking of that, I noticed how many things we did today that required a little tapping, a bit of a push, some just-after-the-fact adjustment to line up properly for the job they were intended to do. We needed to pour concrete for another course of foundation; and to do that we needed to set up boards as concrete forms; and to hold the boards in place we created struts of masonry blocks piled on each other, angled against the boards, backed up with more blocks, pushed up together in whatever way would provide the most leverage for the board. It wasn't precision work. But the boards held, and the concrete stayed where it was put, and the foundation course looked pretty straight. There were rebar towers already set in concrete at the bases of several footings all the way around the structure; and while the bases of the towers were secure, the tops weren't always straight. As the new foundation course went in, the towers were propped into straighter line with sticks and struts and whatever could bring them into line before the next courses of blocks could grow around them. Wooden planks made up the majority of the concrete forms; but they had open ends, and the concrete had to be prevented from flowing out the ends; so Todd Doorenbos and Lee N and I stuffed wet heavy paper -- concrete bags, actually, that had been dunked in a pail of water -- into the places where the flowing concrete had to be dammed. It looked mighty strange. But when the concrete was poured into the forms the paper held, and it left just the open spaces needed to set in extra rebar cages and footing grids when the foundation reinforcements are built.

A lot of the things we did today required a little tapping, a little push, some propping up, some stuffing in, some little bit of adjustment before they came into line, before they were square enough to do the jobs they were meant to do.

In Christian theology we talk about "justification," and the best simple explanation of justification that I've ever heard related it to the practice of "justifying" a paragraph of text. A "justified" text has a straight margin on both the right and the left, both the beginning and end of each line. The lines line up in a satisfying square. In order to achieve the even margin on the right-hand side, the typesetter (or, now, the word processing program) has to add tiny bits of space between words, even between individual characters. In the days of movable type, the printer had to tap on the type, push a little here, pull a little there, in order to add the extra spaces to make the lines line up. But when all the work was done, the paragraph was justified, the characters were squared off in right relationship.

I think perhaps that's how God does the work of justification in us: a tap here, a push there, a bit of insight, an eye-opening experience, a forgiveness offered, a love deepened: bit by bit, God adjusts us in small ways to come into righter relationships, to line up our energies and actions and thoughts and feelings in something more like the way God really wants us to be. Like the grid for the footing, we are not squared up true all at once, but it takes some time and effort to bring our potentials into realization of God's best will for us.

But, unlike the footing grid, we have the capacity to work along with God, to co-operate in the adjustments that make us more true, to be part of the work of making our own souls. Not self-justification, but cooperating with God in the work of our mutual justification, our mutual adjustment and accommodation, for the righting of our many relationships.

A tap here, a push there, with humility and with good will -- that's how we become squared up true in God's love.

Church

Today is The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ. We celebrated the feast day twice, once at Espiritu Santo in Santa Rita -- the first church our mission team helped to build many years ago -- and once with the congregation of Santa Maria Virgen -- whose church we are helping to build on this trip.

The morning service at Espiritu Santo was deeply moving for many reasons. We had a baptism -- which is especially appropriate for the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus. Little Alex Mauricio, the son of a young woman who has been helping to serve lunches to our work team on all our mission trips, was welcomed into the church family today. Standing up for him as godparents were Margaret and Oakley Pearson. Their role in the service, and in Alex's life, is a wonderful outward and visible sign of the deep relationships that have been formed over the years of these mission trips. I was invited to participate in the service as well; I had asked if I could anoint Alex with the oil in baptism, so I had the privilege of saying to Alex "You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ's own forever" -- something I find personally meaningful in every baptism I preside at, but even more significant in this cross-cultural, bilingual, all-Episcopal baptism we shared today. Then, to my surprise, Father Mejia, the one priest who serves all those congregations around Copan, invited me to say the Great Thanksgiving at Eucharist, and to administer the bread to the people. I said the prayer in English, and spared them my very very poor pronunciation of Spanish; but the administration I chose to say in their language. They received by intinction, with me dipping the wafers in the wine and placing them on their tongues. a practice we don't do too often at Trinity; so the words I spoke to them as they received were "The Body and Blood of Christ," "El Cuerpo y la Sangre de Cristo." I am quite sure I didn't pronounce it correctly; but somehow the combination of the deep familiarity of Communion with the practice and words that were unfamiliar to me brought home the unfathomable mystery of the sacrament: that the God who is beyond all our understanding and comprehension nevertheless comes to be with us as we are, in terms we can understand, and lifts us out of ourselves to be more than we could ever imagine. Baptism and Communion are the cornerstones of that mysterious reality.

After the service we were invited up the hill -- and it was a very long and steep hill! -- for lunch at Adela and Mauricio's (Alex's parents) house, and they prepared for us a wonderful meal and genuinely heartfelt hospitality. While we were eating, Lee Beam shared with me a thought she later posted on Facebook (some of you may have seen it already), that we say we come to Copan to build churches, but really we build relationships. And our morning at Espiritu Santo bore witness to the truth of that. But it also got me to thinking that really, at the heart of it, the church is relationships: the church is the people, and the love of Christ that binds them together; the building is a manifestation of the community, a physical sign and vehicle of the community's presence, and so the building is pretty important; but really, the church is the relationships. We come to Copan to build churches -- and that starts with the relationships we form on the worksite and in the worship services and at mealtimes and in supporting education -- and even in being godparents -- and the buildings that rise from the trenches we dig and the rebar we tie are the outward and visible signs of those inward and spiritual relationships. Both are part of building the church.

This evening we attended a second church service, the people of Santa Maria Virgen (whose church is now just foundations and rebar and dreams) gathered in the garage of their lay leader, for a service of Evening Prayer and scripture and song. We sang songs that we Americans of course didn't know; but they had easy tunes, and refrains of simple words that were easy to pick up after a time or two -- and we could always clap along. After the service the Junior Warden (more or less) spoke about a fundraising dinner they were planning to pay for more building supplies; he mentioned that those who did not attend the supper would get an envelope for their contribution nonetheless. It reminded me that church stewardship is much the same no matter the language or culture. There again, it became clear that praying together and working together meant building the relationships that are the church, and of which the physical building is the material epiphany.

The original New Testament word for "church" is ekklesia, which literally means "those who are called out." Worshiping today at Espiritu Santo and Santa Maria Virgen made me think of how we are all called out: called out of our comfort zones, called out of our regular routines, called out of our complacencies, called out to reach across borders and boundaries, called out to proclaim by word and deed even when our words aren't the same, called out to be brothers and sisters with people about whom we know no more than that they too love and follow Jesus, called out to come together in water and oil and bread and wine in the most unexpected places.

Building the church, deepening relationships, being ekklesia, come to us today in the form of a dove -- like Luke says in his baptism narrative, like the mural painted on the front wall of Espiritu Santo -- and in a little boy with Honduran parents and Virginian godparents. May God grant us to build this kind of church in all our baptized lives.

San Rafael

Today we spent our morning visiting the school at San Rafael that is supported through our TIME, that is, Trinity's International Mission for Education. One Sunday a month at Trinity we take a special collection to support schools with which we have a relationship: one is St Marc's School in Cerca la Souce in Haiti, and the other is the school at San Rafael. Its official government name is the Francisco Morazan school -- but everyone here just calls it San Rafael.

The school complex is fairly small: four classrooms (or three classrooms and a faculty room -- I couldn't read the Spanish etched in the concrete outside the doorways well enough to be sure), a small courtyard with a swingset, a kitchen-cum-shed, a washbasin and bathrooms, and a small plot of land for a garden. In these classrooms they teach about 95 primary schoolchildren in the morning, and about 75 secondary students in the afternoon. There are three teachers, an administrator named Carolina, her husband Edgar who teaches one subject and provides transportation in his pickup truck, and one other man who teaches a couple of subjects. Carolina is paid by the government (and the government is several months behind in payments). Two of the teachers are paid by Trinity's contributions through TIME, the third receives a little help from the other two, and the two men are (as far as I can tell) unpaid. They work as hard as they do with as little pay as they get because they know that education is absolutely essential for improving the lives of people in the five communities served by this one school. San Rafael opened in 2005; before that there was no school at all for these five communities. It is remarkable to see face-to-face how much they have achieved in a short time with slender means.

When Edgar drove us up to the school this morning, Carolina was waiting to greet us, along with the three women teachers and a handful of students. Classes are not in session now -- their break is from November until February, not in the summer like our schools -- but a few students had come in on a Saturday to meet their Trinity visitors and help us get to know their school. They danced a couple of traditional dances for us there in the small courtyard, including a Honduran polka that involved much flouncing of large circle skirts. One dance simulated courtship, with the boys trying to impress the girls, the girls initially refusing to be interested, and boys and girls finally circling with their hands clasped. They also spoke with us, a little, through Oakley's translations, about the subjects they studied and how much the school meant to them. Carolina and Edgar told us about their hopes to build another classroom -- which their numbers of students clearly warrant -- and how the parents were willing to do the building so long as they could get materials. I thought about what it would be like if I'd been asked to help build a classroom for the school my kids attended -- and I came to admire those San Rafael parents on the spot.

We were invited to look through the classrooms on our own. There were lots of colorful posters, charts with words and numbers, a diagram of the solar system (I've never seen planet names in Spanish before!), paper cutouts with reminders of good classroom behavior (Do your homework, Eat only during recess, Respect your teachers) which we tried to puzzle out until Oakley translated them for us. In one room I found a list of words that I could mostly recognize: Los Valores, The Virtues. In handwritten letters on colored construction paper were the Spanish words for Perseverance, Freedom, Respect, Honesty, Solidarity -- and one on the bottom I couldn't guess from cognates: Agradecimiento. I asked Oakley to come into the classroom and read it for me,and he said "Thankfulness, Gratitude" -- and then the list was complete. I thought of the core values of our society, and of the Christian community we enjoy and work for at Trinity -- and especially of that last one, Thankfulness, which is key to them all but all too often one of the last that we think about -- and I couldn't help but feel a deep connection and affection for this place. It means so much more to me now to remind people of TIME Sunday and their opportunity to be generous, now that I have been to this school and have caught a glimpse of its values -- and its value. (And it makes me even more sure that I need to visit St Marc's in Cerca la Souce one day soon, too.) This school is changing the lives of children and five communities, and we have a share in their hope.

I'm not sure how the coffee farm and community and school of San Rafael first got their name; but in the Bible (Book of Tobit, in the Apocrypha) Raphael is the name of the angel sent to guide Tobias through his journey to find a wife and to save his family. Rafael provides key advice -- even medical assistance -- to Tobias; and because of that the Angel Raphael is traditionally identified as a patron of wisdom and healing. I believe the school of San Rafael is a source of wisdom and healing in the hills above Copan, and I was humbled and thrilled -- and thankful -- to visit it today.

Wire work

Most of our work at Santa Maria Virgen today had to do with wire. Because the church is going to be a two-story building, it needs very strong foundations, and the way the foundations will be strengthened is by laying rebar cages lengthwise in the trenches and burying them in cement.

For those who don't know (and I wouldn't have known without coming on these trips) rebar cages are structures made with different lengths and widths of wire. The rebar itself is a long steel rod -- which I suppose qualifies as a very thick wire -- with a raised texture to give it grip. A rebar cage is made with four (sometimes six) long rods of rebar held together by square rings. The rings are made from somewhat thinner wire bent into the ring shape. And the rings are held onto the rebar with even thinner wire ties. Most of our team spent most of our day making these rebar cages.

There are several stages to rebar cages. The mid-size wire has to be bent into rings. To do that, there is a jig consisting of several nails driven partway into a thick wooden board. Cut lengths of wire are run into the jig and bent around the nails with a special bending wrench. Lee Beam applied herself assiduously to the bending of rings for much of the day, spelled at times by one of the Honduran workers who belong to the congregation. Each cage required 43 rings, and we made nine cages today -- that's a lot of bending of rings!

Once 43 rings are ready, the cage is assembled by taking four bars of rebar, laying them horizontally on a series of work struts, and marking them at regular intervals to show where the rings should go. Rings are threaded onto the rebars and spaced at the marks. Then the rings need to be tied to the rebar with thinner wire ties. This is handwork: wire is looped over ring and rebar in a figure-8 pattern and twisted together at the corner. It requires strong thumbs; and it strengthens thumbs that keep at it for awhile. I'm going to be a formidable text-messager after a few days of this! The hand-twisted ties are then twisted tighter, and the wire-ends are cut off, with a tool called a "nipper," leaving a tight fit of ring to rebar. When all the corners of one side are done, the entire cage must be flipped over on its support struts, and the twist-and-nip process repeated on the other side, until all four corners of every ring are tightly tied to a rebar length. Bending, tying, twisting, nipping -- then and only then is the rebar cage complete.

At the height of our work day we had two tying stations going, building two cages simultaneously, and we were moving like a well-oiled machine.

Or, not so much. We weren't always so organized. We ran out of rings from time to time. Not enough thin wire had been cut into ties every so often. Tying the figure-8 loop wasn't a motion to which our fingers were accustomed at first; some ties had to be redone. Nippers went missing and were rediscovered. A group working on one cage had to stop and help the other group carry a finished cage from its struts. Wrists unused to so much twisting began to hurt. Skin was scratched from reaching across sharp wire-ends. As the day warmed, we were not without our frustrations and impatiences. But we kept building cages, building cages and more cages, until we used up all the rebar and had accomplished more than we had realized.

That was our day of wire work.

In movies and theater, "wire work" refers to simulated flying: using a harness and wires to lift someone and move them around as if they were airborne. It's the sort of thing you see in stage productions of Peter Pan and on the sets of kung fu movies. Several times in this day of wire work I thought of that other use of the term, and thought to myself how little this rebar-tying resembled flying. I couldn't even indulge flights of fancy, the way one can when doing repetitive manual work: there were enough variations in the task that the mind had to stay engaged. It was very down-to-earth stuff, scratches and sore thumbs and waiting for more wire and all.

And yet, when the rebar was gone and our wire work was done for the day, and we got to take a look at how the foundations of the church building are coming into place, and knew that our rebar cages are part of what is making that foundation strong -- there was a moment when I felt a little lighter, when my step didn't come down on the ground quite so hard, when it seemed like I'd moved my qi even a little beyond the drag of gravity, when it felt like maybe happy thoughts could lift us higher than we knew. Building something up means rising above the drag of dissolution -- and that was what our wire work accomplished today.

And, on the way home, we passed the truck delivering more rebar to the work site. I think I know what Monday will have in store...

Waiting

It seems like I've spent a good deal of the past two days waiting. Waiting in airports, waiting for takeoff, waiting for work to begin. And even when I haven't been waiting per se, a number of the things I have been doing have involved sitting still while other things happen around me -- which could be thought of as another kind of waiting.

Our mission group left Staunton at about 1:15 in the morning on Wednesday. Ten of us and our luggage -- and two drivers who generously gave their wee morning hours to the cause -- packed ourselves into a van and a pickup truck and drove three hours to Reagan National Airport. It was an uneventful drive, which is what you really hope for at that time of the morning; there was some conversation, but there was also some sleeping in the back of the van, as we made our way through the dark. When we reached the airport, we had to wait for check-in (which was not running full-speed at four in the morning) and security, in order to make our way to the gate and wait for boarding. Our party was spread out through the plane, so we couldn't talk much with each other -- and conversation on a plane is always an iffy proposition -- so much of the flight time felt like waiting to arrive. And when we arrived at the airport in San Pedro Sula, there was still a five hour drive to Copan Ruinas, over roads that were in fairly bad shape after a rainy winter; and several of us jouncing around in the back were waiting most eagerly to get to our hotel. We arrived safely, found our rooms, and then regrouped for dinner at a favorite restaurant in town, and made an early night of it. After all, we'd been up all night, and in the morning we'd have work to do!

But when we arrived at the worksite this morning, we found that supplies we needed hadn't been delivered yet, so there was more waiting. The church of Santa Maria Virgen sits in a beautiful spot on the flank of the mountain that reaches up above the city of Copan Ruinas. There was fog in the city plaza as we left the hotel; by the time we reached the worksite we'd climbed above the fog and found a bright sunny day already in progress. From the worksite we could look out over the valley of the Copan River and to the mountain ridge on the other side. Mission-trippers who'd been here last year looked over the work that had been accomplished since the last trip: foundations laid, trenches dug, rebar towers in place. We could also see clearly how much work there was to do. Without the supplies, though, there wasn't much we could really do just then. We took turns with shovels, adding some space for additional foundation footers that would be needed, because there weren't enough shovels to go around. And we waited.

It occurred to me that all during Advent we at Trinity had talked and preached and prayed about waiting -- it's the Advent thing to do -- but always with the irony that the pre-Christmas season is a tremendously busy time between social parties and family arrangements and church preparations, I'd not done a lot of prayerful waiting in Advent. So perhaps now, on a mountainside in Honduras in Epiphany, was my chance. Perhaps I could use this time not just to wait for a shovel, but to wait in a deeper way as well. The sky was brilliant blue, the mountains across the valley were verdant and lush, there was a branch of vivid red flowers (hibiscus, I think) trailing down the side of the worksite retaining wall, there were people here to build up the church -- not just the building but the communion of saints -- who knew what God might reveal in any moment, if I were just to wait for it?

And then, in a little while, supplies arrived. And there was a whole new variety of jobs to be done: rebar had to be cut, and thick wire had to be bent into square rings for the rebar, and thinner wire had to be cut into ties for the rings, so that they could all be put together into square forms that will be put in the foundations and walls to strengthen their structure. Our waiting issued forth into constructive (literally!) work.

Time waiting -- even when you don't know exactly what you're waiting for -- can become the origins of something creative and constructive when you offer it in the context of God's creating grace. And while it seemed to take a lot of waiting to get here, being here is already being at good work.