On July, 5 1991, I finished missionary "boot camp" in Florida and flew with my team of teenagers to Guatemala, my first time outside of the U.S. I spent 7 weeks there.

One time, we went to a Pentecostal Church in Guatemala City (not the cathedral pictured above, in Antigua). There were two lines of folks going up to get "slain in the spirit." A fellow on my team, Caleb, and I, both from decidedly non-Pentecostal backgrounds, thought, "what the hell" and went forward, he in one line, I in the other. We both arrived to our respective slaying stations at around the same time. At first they pressed hard on the forehead and prayed urgently. After a couple of minutes it escalated to heavy slaps on the forehead and yelling. Eventually, they changed the lighting in the auditorium so that it was all directed to the praise & worship leaders onstage and away from the slaying areas, and Caleb and I were quickly led to a side room to prevent further embarrassment, stepping over the successfully slain as we made our way. Good times.

I did not really care for the food in Guatemala so much. It is not for lack of a love of Latin American cuisine. The best meal I have ever had in my life I had in central Mexico, a meatless picnic prepared for a group of us who had laid a concrete floor for a church.

I remember visiting a few Catholic churches (as tourists, not as worshippers) in Guatemala and feeling that there was a bit more gravitas to them than the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches we had visited (most of the Evangelical churches there were of a charismatic bent, I remember being surprised that at the big Nazarene church in Guatemala City we visited plenty of folks were speaking in tongues - this surprised a buddy of mine on my team as his father had been fired from a Nazarene college in the U.S. for attending a charismatic prayer group - I would learn later that the rules in the zany world of missions are quite different than they are in the States for a number of religious institutions - I would also later meet no small number of missionaries who hated American Christianity and became missionaries in large part to escape it). I suppose that was around the time in my life I began to think about such things.