GOD ORCHESTRATES THREE CULTURES INTO ONE TEAM
What can happen to Dutch people when they visit
a church of the Nazarene during their vacation.
In January 2001 I
wasn’t doing too well. In my (stressful) job I had developed Repetitive Strain
Injury and while I was working on my recovery, my mum died unexpectedly on
January 8th at 51 years of age. It was the drop that made the bucket
overflow, as we would say in Dutch. I had hardly any energy left.
My husband Maurits worked as a consultant at that time. During
that period a company hired him that wanted him to install software and train
employees around Europe, as well as on Curacao and St. Lucia. I had planned to go with him on his trip to
the Caribbean, at our own expense, and we took extra days
off from work to turn it into a vacation as well. Maurits’ trip to the Caribbean was to take place at the end of January. Because
I had so little energy, we were glad that the company agreed to postpone the
trip until March. I just about managed to pack my suitcase by then and we took
off for a long journey to the tropical islands. Our second stop was on St. Lucia, where we were to stay for a week. We had
never heard of St. Lucia before. I bought a ‘Mini Rough Guide’ of the
island prior to our trip. During the four days or our vacation we stayed in a
hotel around Castries, where I had read the tourist area was
situated.
Maurits and I are members of the Rotterdam Church of the Nazarene in the Netherlands. We’ve found that it is always a great
experience to visit a church of the Nazarene abroad. We couldn’t find the
Church of the Nazarene in the yellow pages though, so we went to the reception
of our hotel to ask about it.
‘I think I have a
friend who goes there,’ the lady at the reception said. ‘Let me call her.’ Her
friend didn’t go to the Church of the Nazarene, but she had a friend whom she
thought went there. The lady at the reception called the friend of her friend,
and a friend of a friend of her friend and in the end came up with a time and an
address: Waterworks
Road, Castries.
It turned out to be the
warmest welcome I have ever had in a church. Elizabeth Ragnanan told us they
were waiting on the members of a team that had been working on the parsonage
the week before. We were invited to join their potluck meal after the service
countless times, and so we did. We met local church members as well as members of
the team and their leaders, Jack and Joyce Connor, to whom we gave our address
in the Netherlands. It wasn’t until five o’clock that we picked up the key to our hotel room at
the reception.
As our plane took off
I said to Maurits: ‘I really want to visit this island again.’
One-and-a-half years later we received a letter through the mail from Joyce
Connor, inviting us to join a Work & Witness team from Virginia, USA, to St. Lucia. We just hung a plastic curtain to prevent
dust from creeping into our house during the work on a small extension to our
small Dutch home. We decided to join the team, and did the same in 2004 and
2005. In 2006 and 2007 we helped (re)build the church on Grenada. On our first Work and Witness trip we found
out that there were three Nazarene churches on St. Lucia at that time. The lady at the reception had
given us the address of the Nazarene Church that was farthest from our hotel, while the closest one was at walking
distance from our hotel!
These trips have been
wonderful experiences. We have learned a lot about the ‘economy’ of the Kingdom of God: through giving our euros to the work of God,
we have received so much more ourselves. I do not have words to express my amazement
about that lesson.
Every time we leave St. Lucia it feels like leaving home. When we join a
team we know we will feel like we are amongst family. It is very special to be
able to feel one in Jesus Christ amongst people from other cultures.
Esther Kalf