My current Spanish teacher and I are taking one or two field trips a week during class so that I can have a break from classwork at the table and practice Spanish in different settings. Today we ventured a little further from home to a town called San Andres Itzapa, where many Mayan/indigenous people (among others) journey to visit the Temple of San Simon (also known as Maximon). Visiting this temple made me very sad, much in the way visiting Hindu temples in India made me sad. The people are praying to this statue, lighting candles, performing rituals, paying to be spiritually "cleansed" by the brujos (witchdoctors), etc. All I could see were people desperate for hope, for love, for a Savior but looking in the wrong direction.
At one point, one of the brujos was patting me on the back and saying something I couldn't understand, which compelled me to pray. I prayed not only for myself but also for the people in the temple who so desperately need to encounter Truth. Inside the temple, I saw a man carry his little baby up to the statue and allow a bruja to perform a cleansing ritual on both of them. Outside the temple, we watched as a brujo performed a ritual around a campfire of sorts to cleanse a woman. When the fire began blowing in the opposite direction from where she was standing, the brujo explained to her that the direction of the fire indicated that the bad spirits within her were so bad that it would require more money and a longer ritual to cleanse her. We watched as she paid him around $65 to continue.
Please pray for these people who are walking in spiritual darkness.
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