A friend, the campus minister in charge of the trip, had drafted me to be one of the leaders of the group. Mostly I think he needed someone to be one of the drivers for the 20-hour road trip.
Two things stick in my mind about that week
Conversion experience
First, I experienced what I’ve told people was a true conversion experience during that trip.
On the first morning in Mexico I woke up early, no longer able to continue lying in my sleeping bag on the concrete floor of a half-finished church building. We had spent five hours the previous evening getting a head start on the week’s work, physically taxing construction work. My 50 year old body took a full 15 minutes to unlimber and get itself off the floor.
Once up, I heard murmured voices from a small room just off the larger assembly hall. I gingerly tiptoed around the dozens of students who were still asleep and walked through a door.
The other five of “the old people,” as the students called us, were already awake, sitting on folding chairs, drinking coffee.
I stepped to the coffee pot, grabbed a small Styrofoam cup, and poured myself a drink of black tar.
My friend, the group leader, looked at me with wide eyes because he knew I don’t drink coffee. I’ve never even liked the smell of coffee.
“Unless you’ve got a cold bottle of Coke hidden in this room,” I said, “I’ll take my caffeine wherever I can find it.”
I drank a cup of coffee every morning that week. On the return trip home I bought the largest cup of gas station coffee I could find at every refueling stop along the way. I was so tired from the long, hard week, I needed all the help I could get for the long drive home.
After we finally got back home it was many hours before the accumulated caffeine would allow my body to sleep.
I’ve been a coffee drinker ever since.
Let them praise the name of the Lord
The other notable memory from that week began on that same morning. My fellow ‘old people’ were occupying all the available chairs in the small room, so I stepped outside, hoping to unlimber my stiff joints.
As the door closed behind me, I emerged into the brisk pre-dawn. The sky was still dark, with only the barest suggestion of light on the eastern horizon.
Villa Union is a town of about 6,000 people and what must be around 50,000 chickens. I had noticed the day before that every home surrounding the tiny church had chickens scratching around in the mostly dirt in the yards.
While we had worked on various projects that week, the rooster in the yard next door would emit a bellowing crow every few minutes. His dignity and his feathers were apparently ruffled by all this unexpected activity in his neighborhood.
On this first morning, that rooster was not alone in expressing himself.
As the sun prepared to make its daily appearance, every rooster in town was doing what roosters do at dawn. Thousands of them were crying out to the heavens, announcing the approaching dawn.
I’m a city boy who had never heard even one rooster crying out the report of a new day. Where I live the new day is announced by an alarm clock and the sound of traffic in the streets.
Cock-a-doodle-doo doesn’t begin to describe the sound of thousands of chanticleer voices echoing together. It was an unbroken wall of sound, filling the night air.
I was stunned, poleaxed, my jaw dropping. I looked up into the sky, tears forming in my eyes at the wonder of such a thing.
The blending of the reverberating voices reminded me of the echoing voices of monks singing Gregorian chants. I’m not a Catholic but I own several CDs of chants. I find them relaxing and uplifting. Because I don’t understand the Latin words, the monks voices are like the purest praise.
Like the monks’ chorale, the song of the rooster multitude put me in mind of what it must have been like for the shepherds to hear the voices of a host of angels praising God, echoing the news of the Savior’s birth across the hillsides.
Just as the angels were designed to be God’s messengers, the roosters were faithfully fulfilling the role for which God had created them. The choir of feathered callers were using their God-given talents to sing the praises of the God who gave them their voices.
I walked around the yard, my hands lifted toward the heavens, tears streaming down my eyes. I joined in with the roosters, praising God for the new day in this strange land.
When the first of the sleepy students wandered out of the church building, they found me standing in the middle of the construction site, my arms raised toward the heavens, welcoming the sunrise. The roosters’ hallelujah chorus was all but finished.
I’m not sure the students believed me when I told them what they’d missed, but some of them got up earlier later in the week and welcomed the dawn with me. And thousands of roosters.
Praise the Lord, all ye roosters. And praise the Lord everyone.
