A letter from Ashley Wright in Honduras
April 2011
2011 Honduran Presbyterian Women’s Retreat
Background
Women lift their praises to God.
In February the women of the Presbytery of Honduras held their fourth annual Honduran Presbyterian women’s retreat. For many months we had feared there would be no retreat this year because of lack of funding, but then in January money became available to help support the retreat. We asked the women to pay 100 lempiras each (about $5) for the weekend, and the grant we received paid the balance of the 600 lempiras plus transportation for each of the women. Due to this generous gift, we were actually able to have the retreat at a nicer place this year with luxuries like a separate dining hall with tables and bathrooms with plenty of running water. We even had hot water in the showers, something most of the women lacked in their own homes.
On Friday afternoon 70 women from churches all over the Presbytery met at Peña de Horeb Church, climbed into the old yellow school bus and headed for the camp. We had dinner and then a worship service. I had been meeting over several weeks with Yolanda (the president of the women) and several of women in leadership, and we had decided to begin on Friday evening with a foot-washing service. Yolanda told me I would need first to preach about this odd commandment of Jesus because many of the women had never participated in a foot washing before.
That evening we began by reading in John’s gospel about what Jesus had done with his disciples, and I talked about how Jesus asks us to do this for each other as an act of love. I reminded everyone how we are all equal in the eyes of Christ; no one is better or more deserving than anyone else. I said it seems that women are always tending to other people’s needs, and it can be very hard for us to accept love from others — we are programmed to give and not receive. This retreat, I said, would be about receiving God’s love.
We broke the women up into seven groups of about eight women each. I went into one group in the front to demonstrate for everyone. I got my pan and soap and towel and said, “OK, who would like to be first?” After a few minutes of nervous silence, I turned to a woman close to me and said, “How about you?” She agreed, and I rolled up her pants legs and started to wash her feet. I told the women that as they were washing another’s feet, they should pray for the woman — pray that the ground would be blessed wherever her feet have trod and that her steps would continue to be blessed wherever she walks. Then everyone started washing feet in their own groups.
There were many tears throughout the activity, and the sound of constant prayer. I did not realize what a powerful experience it would be for the women.
Gloria’s story
This was Gloria’s first retreat. She had been invited by her sister-in-law to attend. Gloria had grown up Catholic but had not been practicing for many years, nor had she been involved in any other sort of church. Gloria was the woman whose feet I chose to wash. I did not know until after the retreat what a huge event this had been for Gloria, and that even a month after the foot washing she is still crying over it.
To Gloria I was a white North American who, in her mind, was better than she. She had never had someone like me, someone of importance and status (her words) serve her in that way. It also really shocked her that I, as the teacher, had come down to serve her. She cried that night in amazement and gratitude and continued to weep over the next four weeks. Now she wants to listen only to Christian music on the radio and is always singing the songs she learned at the retreat. This retreat was the first time she had really experienced the love of Christ in a meaningful way, and it is still blowing her away.
Saturday
On Saturday afternoon, I taught another session.
The retreat was a powerful experience for the Honduran Women of the Church.
After talking with the women in leadership about the situations and needs of the women, I decided to teach about self-esteem from a biblical perspective as well as about our responsibility to “own” our own self-esteem. I began by telling them that God has a plan for our lives from even before we are born: “Before you were formed in the womb, I knew you.” But also our enemy, Satan, has a counter-plan for our lives, and from the beginning he uses whatever method he can to derail us from God’s plan.
We talked about how the culture, wherever we live, tells us certain things about us as women that simply aren’t true. I told a story about having short hair as a woman in Honduras (it is unusual for a woman to have short hair here), and how it made me feel so unattractive here. Whereas in the United States many women have short hair and it is considered attractive. I talked about being a teenager and feeling so insecure about my looks (I’m short with a tendency toward pudginess). We discussed how even in Honduras, perhaps because of television and advertising, women feel they must be tall and thin to be attractive. I told them the story of a tall, thin friend of mine who was called “stringbean” when she was a teenager and still felt the pain of that some 30 years later.
Next I taught about how we have to filter every thought we have through Scripture, so that we will know which of our thoughts echo what God says, and which thoughts echo what the world, or our enemy, says. I gave them the image of a toilet flush handle that is located right in the temple area, and I said that when we have a thought, we need to examine it, and if it doesn’t pass the Scripture test, then we flush it! For example, women frequently think, “I’m fat” or “I’m stupid” or “I’m ugly” — but God does not tell us any of those things in Scripture. Therefore we flush those thoughts. Even though most of the women don’t have flush toilets in their own homes, we did at the retreat center, so they knew what I meant.
Then we did an exercise outside. I had two mirrors set up. One of them was a really cheap mirror that distorted images, and the other was a mirror that somehow takes 5 to 10 lbs. off. (I don’t know how that mirror was made, but I’m definitely importing it back to the United States!) We came out in our groups and one by one, using a Dry Erase marker, we wrote the lies we had believed on the distorted mirror.; When everyone had finished, we repented for having believed lies about ourselves, and then erased them. We then went over to the other mirror, where I had written words and phrases from Scripture that God says about us: beautiful, loved, redeemed, precious, work of art, daughter, free, saved, loved, etc. Then we looked at ourselves in the mirror with our bodies and faces surrounded by these words from Scripture. Many of the women asked for copies of the words, which I brought the next day.
Singing and praying together.
On the first mirror many women had written things like “I’m ugly, I’m fat, I’m stupid.” One woman wrote that she had “feet like a duck.” Others wrote that they were too tall, or too short, or that they had ugly skin. It was sad to see some of the things the women wrote about their perceptions of themselves.
During one of the groups, I saw a woman hanging back from the others at the second mirror. I finally thought to ask her if she could read. She said that she could not, and so I took her up to the mirror by herself, and I read the words that God says about her. One word, bonita, which means pretty, was right in the top middle of the mirror right at eye level. She just stood at that mirror and kept tracing and saying, “bonita” over and over again. You could just watch the word sink in to her as she did that over and over again. It was quite a powerful moment.
Once we got back into the meeting hall, I told the women that I had been at a retreat of North American women three weeks before where we did a similar exercise, and the North American women said virtually exactly the same things about themselves. Women in todo el mundo (all the world) struggle with the same things.
Saturday evening with the gringas
Saturday evening we had two women (gringas) from a church in Tennessee visiting with us, and so we sat down for about an hour to talk with them and to listen to them. The Honduran women talked about their need for reliable and safe child care so that they could work. They discussed health care and the problem of domestic violence. When the women brought up the issue of domestic violence, the floodgates opened and the women shared stories about physical, emotional and verbal abuse that they had been experiencing and how ashamed they were that this was happening to them. One of the visiting gringas was a Presbyterian pastor and psychologist who has had experience counseling victims of domestic violence. I was so pleased to have her with us because she spoke to their situations with the authority of experience; she told them not to be ashamed and that it was not their fault. I can’t explain it well with words, but the pastor was the right person with the right words at exactly the right time. Those women really heard what she had to say.
We all brainstormed together about how we could start to change some things. Among other things, the Honduran women thought that the men would benefit from more educational opportunities about how to deal with their anger, and how to live more like Christ.
Sunday
2011 Honduran Presbyterian Women’s Retreat: “Building A New Future In Christ.”
Sunday worship was so joyful. There was clearly a difference in these women just in the course of the weekend they spent together. You could feel the joy and peace emanating from them. We passed the peace by moving around and hugging one another, and perhaps for the first time ever, I didn’t want the passing of the peace to be over. We all needed to hug each other. After worship, many women came up front and told how much the retreat had meant to them, especially having a place to come and rest and really feel God’s love for them.
As the women left in the big yellow bus, I had to laugh, because it reminded me so much of summer camp. Everyone was wearing their special retreat shirts which read, Construyendo un Nuevo Futuro en Cristo (Building a New Future in Christ). They would get on the bus and then jump back off to pose for pictures with one another, all the while laughing joyously. They just kept running off in large groups to make sure everyone had a chance to make memories to hold them until next year. It was so beautiful. God is good.
Ashley Wright
The 2011 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 288
