Spanish table for 8

I felt deeply out of sync.  “Lord, I need Spanish.  Give me Spanish, I pray.”  Our friend asked me a question, and my brain conjured almost nothing for an answer.  As often happens, my Spanish starts but runs out, leaving me to finish in English and hope somehow the ideas connect.  To listen at first is always good.  To hear conversation of others helps me acclimate.  Yet as we ate dinner, the desire to speak gradually grew, and my words sat on edge.  Briefly I wondered, would it be entirely frustrating to tell this story and not have the words to finish the best part?  Our table of 8 discussed Puerto Rico and a grave problem there, and suddenly my attempt at Spanish spilled out.  “En Estados Unidos tenemos una gran problema.”  I mentioned America’s situation of abortion.  We have these buildings appearing innocuous on the outside, their doors and windows looking harmless from the street.  Yet horror abounds for what happens inside.  I shared testimony of the Lord bringing beauty to so gruesome a setting.  I remember an ice cream vendor who seemed to stop and pray repeatedly in front of the abortion center.  There was the man who walked from down the street to point his wooden recorder toward the sky to play a melody to the Lord, to praise Him for loving us beyond our self-destructive ways.  Little did I know that while I spoke, the Lord was touching our friends who listenened.  Soon I heard one of the men say he would like us to pray.  Before we left our friends’ house that night, we stood to ask the Lord to save these babies, to save the families from years of pain and regret, to extend His mercy to the abortion workers and let them experience His love, that He would conquer any fear and reassure them all that He himself is life and He sustains life.  The next day with church we sang “All my delight is in you, Lord,” immediately reverting me to our days of singing the same in Spanish, translating “Mi deleite está en ti.”  The word deleite has always grabbed my attention, and my heart started to melt.  My knees hit the floor under the weight of His love.  The Lord had led me through a most intimate experience, a deeply moving set of moments where I saw Him supply for my need, really abundantly beyond my need, once again.  He sat at our table, and I welcomed Him.