The plot thickens like lumpy custard.
We have spent this week finding out about life in a cash-using society when you don’t have access to cash. People do use cards here in big places like supermarkets and multi-national petrol stations (although YPF the state-run petrol company won’t accept cards). But day to day purchases from butcher baker and candlestick maker are strictly cash affairs, as is the paying of the rent. Since last Friday we haven’t been able to take money out of the ATM system. We haven’t yet got as far as selling the kids into slavery, but our landlady is becoming antsy.
We appear to have emerged unscathed from the latest round of ministry politics from which we can’t share details in public, but everything has gone quiet on the Western front at the moment anyway.
Mission stuff chugs along. I slipped up to Salta for a few days last week for exec meetings. It was a nice change to go away on my own, and the meetings were far less arduous than sometimes so there was plenty of time for coffee and a long walk.
I’m doing battle with 2 Timothy 4 for this Sunday. It feels a bit like the wall at the three quarter mark of a long distance run; legs hurt and the end isn’t yet in sight. Although in this case probably more brain than legs. My four-sermon series has also just become five since the person up next is going to be away for the first Sunday. But rather than spinning 2 Tim for another week, although there is more than enough scope to do so, I’m thinking I will probably do something random and one-off for Mother’s Day (19th October) possibly involving Isaiah.
Currently listening to classic Marcos Witt, South America’s answer to Graham Kendrick. Mexican, Marcos Witt was the mainstay of every church music group when I came here first in the nineties, and remains popular to this day with his mix of original numbers and enlivened versions of trad favourites.