Kirke

I do stuff like… attend kirke (Norwegian for church).

I have been praying for quite some time that I would meet more people here, preferably that know of or even attend a decent church that I could check out. Its been challenging because the only thing I can really say in Norwegian is “jeg snakker ikke norsk” which means, I don’t speak Norwegian. You clearly see the problem. So I was really thinking about what I could do and praying really hard that somehow I would find someone or somewhere or something. The next morning I checked my email and had received a message on facebook from a girl in one of my classes, it said, "I looked at your profile, are you a Christian? I am too :) You must join me to Salem eg. on Sunday, are you interested? That's the church I go to, and its a meeting for young people every Sunday." Seriously? I was, and still am speechless when I think about how quickly the Lord answered me, He was not messin' around.

Of course I messaged her back quite excitedly and told her I would love to join her. We set up a time to meet at her house (which I had walked past once) on Sunday evening. The time came and after a long day I walked over to her apartment and was perplexed when I didn’t remember which one it was (it didn’t help that it was dark) so I just waited thinking she would come out soon; I was mistaken and looked down at my watch seeing that it was indeed 19.00 (7 PM), when the service started. Dang! I began to walk back to my apartment hoping and praying that I would be able to make it next week. Just as I turned the corner to walk up my steps I heard someone holler my name. I spun around to see Miriam standing on the corner waving at me. I ran over to her in amazement yet again of God’s expeditious response. We talked and walked to the church, which happens to be right down the road from my apartment. We were a little bit late so Miriam asked a tech guy if there was a translation to English that night, and there wasn’t. Which I was fine with because I am rather fond of trying to figure out what people are saying. During a whole church service however this task became exceedingly difficult. There were two songs they sung in English and I recognized both of them!

Other than those two songs however there was only one sentence during the service that was quoted in English. The speaker paused and gazed over the audience slowly uttering these words: “40,000 people die of starvation everyday and you people (the church) don’t give a damn. The worst part about it is that all of you are more concerned with me using the word damn than about the 40,000 people starving right now.” I probably looked shocked but found that to be very interesting. Not only because it was the only thing I understood, but also because as I heard it I was astonished to hear “damn” in the church, and then ashamed to be focusing on one word rather than thousands of peoples lives.