FAITH CAN MOVE MOUNTAINS
It is said, that your faith can move mountains...that your faith can take you wherever you want to long as you believe whole heartedly...long as you ask with a pure heart and devoutedly you seek with all your soul to believe and accept…long as you give your everything…
Droughts in EL Salvador can be hostile, as in any place can be. Our live stock depend on the rain for nutrition, our crops, and us...the rivers, the trees, the wind…we depended on the rejuvenating moisture of a day's rain to flourish our daily activities and gather our strengths to move forth and be carried with the daily adventures and mischiefs of our childhood. Our creativity of crafting depended on it, we used clay to create “weapons,” teacups, merchandise we would sell to other traders – our cousins who joined our crazy adventures of markets, thiefs, and violence. So we were desperate and determined to find a way to make the rain return to us – to give us our sanity and life back. It had not rained for more than a month and things looked very devastating.
IT came as a last resort, our faith, our submission to surrending to something greater than us to help us and guide us through these difficult moments... our four little cousins, my younger siblins and I...all together we reached out to our Abuelita - Josefina for guidance and knowledge of how we could ask God to bless us with rain. We were told that we had to sacrifice our "pride" and humble down before God and ask for His blessings, for the rain we needed. That was it! We needed to bow down to Him and hold reverence. Taking the meaning we were able to understand on our own, we went on our way to accomplish the ultimate sacrifice.
It all happened on the spur of the moment on a super hot day, you could see the dirt twisters on the distance sweep so fiercely carrying the dead weeds and leaving a dusty atmosphere, as if from an episde of Wild West movies. The heat waves were like an ocean's waves...over powering and hard to inhale...It was set, it depended on us the kids to form a type of "sacrifice" and make "offerings" to God. With our heads lifted high, we moved on, gathering our resources for the sacrifice and setting up a “map” for the offerings.
That very hot day, in a concensus, it was decided we would all pick a heavy rock...walk from one end of our land to the other extreme...asking for the blessings... and stoping at every corner. Slowly all seven of us picked the hot rocks from the ground, held them in our hands above our heads, and walked barefooted chanting songs of praises...stoping by all four corners of the land...placing the crucifix and pulling a rosario (rosary), knelt, and began our "ritual.” We cried, we begged, and we lost sense of our pride and we gave it all. Not realizing it was something completely "made up," we belived God would hear us…we were perfoming what we had understood. What Moses did when he needed God to reach down to him... we walked with our arms above our heads and in them the heavy rocks, all of us perfectly lined up...stoping and praying... until our feet were soared, our arms tired, and our voices weak. We completed the sacrifice, yet although nothing happened immediately, our faith did not die down just like that. We believed and kept believing…. We set aside our pride and did not care who saw us acting as "crazy" and there we roamed the land performing our hearts devoution.
It may have been days later, but the rain did come. Our faces glowed with the splendor of such joy only experienced with such innocence. And off we were to dance under those blankets of rain caressing our skins and soothing our soared little bodies. There is nothing better than a dance under a sky filled with such warm and moisture at the same time…it was said that when it is raining and the sun is shinning through, that a king has been born and neither rain can hide the splendor of such magnificent birth…of course, as kids we understood what our minds intended to understand at that time...
It may have been days later, but the rain did come. Our faces glowed with the splendor of such joy only experienced with such innocence. And off we were to dance under those blankets of rain caressing our skins and soothing our soared little bodies. There is nothing better than a dance under a sky filled with such warm and moisture at the same time…it was said that when it is raining and the sun is shinning through, that a king has been born and neither rain can hide the splendor of such magnificent birth…of course, as kids we understood what our minds intended to understand at that time...
And thus, the sacrifice was not in vain. Our Hearts believed and that faith never died down. Somehow in our hearts we knew God was listening and HE was watching us perform the sacrifice of our hearts. We must’ve amuzed HIM greatly for the rain did come. And there we Danced our hearts away being completely soaked from head to toe under the heavy drops...our faith grew and for that we were so thankful.
This is yet another story, my soul speaking out and sharing the longingness to be drawn back to those days of innocense and purity. To feel those moments sprikle my soul with the happiness only felt at that place in those days of glorious deeds.
written: Friday, September 03, 2010
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