Comfort Zone? What Comfort Zone?

I think I'm officially out of my comfort zone.  But I was the one who put myself there.  

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking and thinking about how we, as a group, can help our two progressive Chinese Bible students make further progress.  I'm happy to report that they're already both doing very well.  Most recently one of them has started wearing a skirt to all the meetings (a very big deal for the culture) and the other one has been doing that already for some time now.  Not to mention the fact that they're both at just about every meeting and they participate at all the Chinese ones we have.  But that still leaves the Spanish meetings - the school and the service meeting - where they have a difficult time understanding and have absolutely no share in these two meetings - thus my contemplation session.  So here's what I came up with.  We would encourage the girls to give Bible highlights comments in Chinese at our Spanish meeting by we ourselves giving our comments in Spanish and then translating into Chinese.  Yesterday I presented the idea to the group and it was a hit!  But, guess who was elected to do the first one?  So I arrived at the meeting tonight with my word-for-word written out Spanish comment and my Chinese translated comment printed out immediately after.  Let me just explain that giving Spanish comments still totally freaks me out.  Every week on the way to the meeting I have to practice on the bus all the way to the meeting, muttering the comment under my breath, slowly working out each syllable while trying to sound natural.  Upon the start of the Bible Highlights part I start praying with fervor and basically throw my hand up trying not to think too hard about what I'm doing.  Tonight I added a second component to make me that much more distressed.  I threw my hand up in the usual manner, trying not to think about the impending crazy stares from the unsuspecting audience as well as from the speaker (we cleared it all one of our elders but the brother with the part still didn't know...).  The brother called on person after person but didn't see my hand.  So, Fernanda (a friend of mine in the group) decided to help.  She was sitting behind me and waving her hand all around to attract attention, and that she did, because the brother called on her but when the rover came to give her the mic she refused it and told him to give it to me - further confusion for the poor audience!  I got through comment number one, said Ahora Chino (now Chinese), took a nice big breath and pushed through comment number 2, happily finished, glanced up and saw the ENTIRE congregation staring at me.  What's a comfort zone again ?  I don't even remember.  

I do realize this is my first post in about a million years.  But life has been very busy due to all of our awesome visitors!  Visitor after visitor.  It's been really fun!   

Thanks so much to Fred (from Ohio), Elsie & Hannah (serving in Quito), Christie and Suzannee (visiting from New Zealand), Nicole (staying here for 3 months from Las Vegas), and Jenny and Bethany (from Ohio and Maryland) for coming to visit and for all the good times and memories.

Things are changing very rapidly for me here.  I'll try to keep everyone up to date with the blog - stay tuned!