During the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Marsha and I lived in South Florida. We had gone down there to go to school and while we were there we became part of the culture. I learned more Spanish there than I ever learned in school. We became parents there. We, for all intents and purposes, grew up there. Once in a while you will hear one of us recall the time we lived in Miami, but that isn’t really true. From south to north, there was Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, South Miami, Miami, North Miami, Hialeah, Miami Shores, South Beach, Miami Beach, North Miami Beach, Hollywood, Pembroke Pines and Fort Lauderdale. Unless you really knew where you were, it seemed to be all one big city. You went from one city to the next, surrounded by concrete. Some yards, some palms and lots of concrete. For the first few years we lived in Coral Gables, just across the street from the Coconut Grove town line. Later, I became the Associate Pastor at Sunset Hts. Baptist Church in Hialeah, so we moved there. You couldn’t tell the difference from one place or the other. To the people back in Ohio we lived in Miami, and that was more or less right.

          If you drove eight miles to the west, you were inhe  the Everglades. Really a strange place. A mile from where we lived was the causeway that went across to Key Biscayne, which at that time had whole sections that were basically jungle. Beautiful. It was also on the Key that President Nixon had his Florida estate where he had gone to escape the pressures of the White House. When we lived there the house and grounds still existed, but were surrounded by a high fence.

          Going shopping was always a treat. You would be bombarded by a half a dozen languages. Spanish was the main language, but there was English, Creole, French, Portuguese and, for some reason I never understood, German. Street signs and billboards were mostly in Spanish. I was around Spanish speakers all the time, so I picked it up. Marsha, on the other hand, had a mental block when it came to Spanish. French was doable, and the two languages are in the same family, but she just couldn’t do Spanish. We had to do grocery shopping together because she couldn’t read the signs.

          And the culture! Vibrant, diverse and weird. The metro area was filled with people from the Caribbean, South America, Cuban refugees and the United States. All those people and all their cultures combining to make one insane mix, but it was fun. Like any big city area, there was crime, but for Marsha and myself, the only crime visited on us was from Americans. We lived in a Spanish neighborhood and we had no trouble with any of them. One of our favorite memories from the time concerned our day spent with a Haitian church. Our only real problem came at the hands of good old Americans. The others were mostly over joyed to be in a free land.

Miami was a city that truly never slept. Marsha and I occasionally went bowling at 2 AM. You could go shopping at any time, and we did. One of our favorite restaurants was a Puerto Rican place called Koke’s (pronounced Kokee). There you could get a steak that covered your entire plate, smothered in French fries, and a cola for $2.01. Granted, that was in the early 1980s, but even so, $2.01 was a crazy low price. And it was good! A completely different taste. We went there for about a year and a half, and then we found out that all the horse thievery we had been hearing about on the ranches north of us was being perpetrated by the Koke family. They would steal a horse or two, butcher it and serve it in the restaurant. So, Marsha and I have eaten horse. And it was good!

  When the communist Cuban revolution under Fidel Castro came in 1959, many evangelical Christians left that island. We think of Hispanics as all being Catholic, but there are more and more who are becoming evangelicals. At first, they were free to go. But that changed and more and more of these evangelicals were imprisoned for their faith. From 1959 through 1970, many of these fled to America for religious freedom. Some who reached our shores had just served their time in prison for their faith and were weakened from the systematic beatings and starvations. A great many made their way to Hialeah to settle, and there they created lives for themselves. Along with being successful business people, they also brought that Latino passion to their churches. By the late 70s and early 80s almost all the community was Hispanic. Ours was one of the last Anglo churches in town. (An Anglo is someone whom we here would call an American. There the Hispanics consider themselves to be American, too, which most are. So you have the Hispanics and the Anglos.) We had a large complex built back in the day (late 50s, early 60s) when the church ran 500 people. As the community changed and the Anglos moved away, our church, Sunset Hts. Baptist Church, dwindled. By the time Marsha and I arrived we had dropped to around 50. Meanwhile, there was a Spanish church that shared our building, meeting after us on Sunday morning and their sound and Sunday night. They were Estrella de Belen, or the Star of Bethlehem church. They packed the house every Sunday, over 500 strong. My job for Sunset Hts. Was to focus on music and youth. For Estrella de Belen, I often ran their sound and had their Youth in my group.

 My first real neat discovery was that they sang many of the same songs we sang, just translated to Spanish. Our sound booth was actually in another room and you looked out through a window. Through headphones I could hear what was going on. But the booth was sound proof. While they would be singing, I would be singing as well. Eventually I picked up the Spanish words, which sometimes created a problem in the Anglo church, where I actually led the music. Sometimes I would start a song in Spanish and have to catch myself. When I was running the sound, the preaching time gave me fits. Mostly, I could understand if you spoke slowly. But Spanish folks get more and more animated the more they get into the conversation. So as the pastor (Renaldo Medina, one of my three heroes) got more impassioned, I got further behind in understanding.

Another discovery was that the Spanish folk don’t sit still. All during the service they will wander around. Our Spanish youth wanted to start coming to the Anglo church, because they spoke very good English and because they wanted to be where I was. I had to tell them to remain in one spot throughout the service. When the Spanish did it, it was not disrespectful. They wanted to hear from different locations. It was not disrespectful to the pastor.

And then there was the waving. When someone has a special piece of music in our church, we sometimes clap or say ‘Amen!’ Not in Estrella de Belen. There they waved at you. Energetically waved at you. Like you were a long lost friend they were seeing across a busy street. I laughed out loud the first time I saw it. It just caught me by surprise. I would run the sound, then go home and our Sunday afternoon would begin and I just never told Marsha much about the Spanish church. One day Pastor Medina asked Marsha to sing at the church. She would sing an English song and most of the folks understood English pretty well. I thought I would tell her about the waving, but then I decided not to tell her. I wanted to see her reaction. She did the song and then started to walk away and everyone started waving at her like crazy. She stopped and stared, started to walk away and stopped again. Everyone was still waving, so she waved back. Just killed me.

 But their faith was so real to them, so personal, so alive. Isn’t it amazing that people of faith, regardless of language or country or politics share this amazing thing? Jesus Christ died for them and for you and for me. It makes all the difference.

          Blessings.