Monday, June 14, 2010

Arrested Development

Title by Chad.  So today, quite the circumstance came up.
My friend, a missionary from Costa Rica, was with me today hanging up posters promoting the mega-event Love Extreme.  We had already hung up 45 posters or more and we decided to go down a really busy road, that eventually leads to the main square.  We went into the median of the busy road to put posters on the poles of the billboards.  We were on our third pole on this highway when these two policemen showed up next to us.  I can understand a fair amount of Spanish, but luckily Scott is fluent.  I knew that once they got out and opened the back door of their truck, they wanted us to get in.  Apparently, the violation was that we were hanging up signs on public property and they take that very seriously.  They were on their way to taking us to their main station when we (and when I say "we" I mean I just listened to Scott) were working on convincing them otherwise.  We found out that they were on their way to write up a "denuncia," which would force us out of Peru, back to our home countries.  Right then, Scott became very apologetic and took the blame for everything.  He said that they do it differently in Costa Rica and that I had only been down here a month.  This is the best thing to do, just agree with them and bathe yourself in blame.  The conversation started to change, and Scott used the words, "Tengo mucha peina," a lot.  These words mean to feel so bad about what has happened.  While they were grilling us from the front seat in their truck, the driver was popping a zit in the rearview mirror.  It was the most odd situation ever.  Eventually they let us go on the premise that we tell the director of the event to only hang the signs up on private property.  But the story doesn't stop there.  Had we not been picked up by the police, then we wouldn't have gotten a taxi to go back home (because the officers drove for a bit.)  Had we not gotten in the taxi to let us go home, we wouldn't have been able to invite that driver to the event.  We invited him and talked with him the whole ride back home.  He said he was going to bring his family and then we even got to pray with him.  After we got out of the taxi, I was telling Scott how we had gone to both extremes inside of twenty minutes.  And a couple hours later, Scott asked me if I saw the guy popping his zit in the mirror and we had a couple of laughs at that.

2 comments:

  1. Oh my...I'm glad God was with you and Scott knew how to apologize so well. My heart was beating fast just reading it. I love you...and be careful.
    <3 Mom

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  2. O Wow! Talk about trusting in the Lord! He knows what He's doing. Teaching you guys to trust and those who love you at home to trust too.

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