Tonight, at about 6:30pm, I showed up for service at a street corner walking distance from my house. I didn't see anyone when I got there but then I heard a "Hello" behind me and there was Chen Dixiong smiling at me. He's the guy who wants to read the Insight Volumes, a young guy in his mid-twenties. Within a few minutes several more brothers and sisters showed up and then we were a block away making service groups. The brother in charge put me with Lin Da again, the talkative teen-age girl I was with last time. Everyone thought this was funny since I had the same partner the Friday before. And she was just as talkative as she was last week, though she claimed that she was tired today from having to take a test. She was pretty upset that she her cell phone photograph of a "cute dog" hadn't turned out, she and a couple other girls had run across the street to get a better look at someone's "cute dog."
After a little more than 30 minutes it began to rain. For a few minutes it was heard but not felt, you really didn't need an umbrella even though you could hear it raining. But then it started to pick up, we had to yell at the house holders so they could hear us, while we were in an apartment building. When we got outside it rained even harder. This meant it was break time, about 15 of us huddled under porches and roof overhangs with our umbrellas open for extra protection, chatting and talking about the rain. There was lightning flashing in the sky and frequent thunder claps piercing the sound of the rain hitting the rooftops.
I can only describe this rain as "jungle rain" after about 15 minutes of it, even a few feet back from the edge of an overhang my pants were soaked up to my knees. It looked like I had waded through a river, but it was only the splash back from the rain hitting the pavement a few feet away. Eventually the brother in charge had us all walk a block away to where there was a 7-11 with a fully covered sidewalk, much drier there, though the wind still blew a rain mist at us. After another 10-15 minutes of us loitering around 7-11, with me trying to take pictures of the kids and the rain, the brother in charge told us to go home. Which meant I was going to get even wetter. Without an umbrella you'd be soaked to your undies in about 5 seconds.
So I did, I walked home, about a 15 minute walk, and I was wet up to my pants pockets, I had to move my digital camera into my back-pack, even though my back-pack was soaked pretty badly too. And so went my "jungle rain in the ministry" experience. Good thing I brought my umbrella today. Even now, over an hour later, it's raining just as hard outside.