The Government is Upon His Shoulder (Part III)

Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised:

After I asked for your prayers for God's financial provision for our upcoming missionary training, He miraculously provided the total cost... through one donor! So please praise Him for His answer to your prayers.

Also, on our last trip to the community of Ayuma, Nelly learned two more stories of the life of Jesus. But what was even more incredible was that we got to watch her share the story of the birth of Christ with one of her friends. (Click below to view the video. It's in Quechua, but you can still get the idea.) Wow! That is a HUGE step towards our goal of Quechua reaching other Quechua with the Gospel, and we are so excited about this!



Prayer Necessities for the Skimmers:

1. Jeremiah once said, "If I say, 'I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,' his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot" (Jer. 20:9). Please pray that God would instill in the people of Ayuma a passion for His Word that will burn in their hearts as it did in Jeremiah's such that they would not be able to hold it in but would HAVE to speak it to others. Pray that His Word would spread like wildfire from this community to the rest of the province.

2. Please lift up Misty and Amy, as they have 3-1/2 more weeks to go in their last trip to Taramarca. Pray that they would remain faithful to share the stories with the people there, and pray that the people would really grasp what the girls are trying to teach.

3. Pray that God would send us exactly the right women to participate in our missionary training that begins November 27. As of now, we have 13 who are interested, but a smaller group of 4-8 is preferable. Pray that He would show them and us the ones who are to be trained at this time. (We are pictured here with two different groups of girls who are interested in being trained.)




Inquiring Minds Wanna Know (Bonus for the Readers):

OK, so where did I leave off last time? Oh, yeah. After reading Mk. 11:23-24, we had just prayed that God would grant us a miracle and give us our Bolivia resident visas in a mere three days. Never mind that we had waited eight months, and it seemed impossible. We had no idea how He would accomplish what we had requested, but our God is a big and powerful God, and we knew that He could do it!

But then, the unthinkable happened.

Immediately after we prayed together, Leah and I went to the immigration office in Cochabamba. When we walked back to talk with the immigration official, we explained everything: That we had begun the visa process in Cochabamba but now lived in Sucre, that we had been telling the truth about where we lived when we began the process but that our location had now changed, that we had been waiting eight months to receive the resident visa. And then we listened as he very politely explained that there was nothing he could do and that, according to new immigration regulations, we would have to begin the process over again in Sucre.

We were crushed, but we weren't quite ready to give up yet. I asked the official if we could just get a letter from the Cochabamba Immigration Office stating that we were in the process of receiving our visas. Such a letter would allow us to leave the country for our meeting (and my vacation in the US) and return to Bolivia without penalty.

We were very much looking forward to the team meeting but, if we left the country without that letter, we would have to spend time outside the country trying to obtain special temporary visas to allow us to re-enter Bolivia in order to get the permanent resident visa. And there was not even a guarantee that we could get those temporary visas, as they're next to impossible to get in Peru. And that doesn't even take into account the fact that spending any more time away from the Quechua meant losing invaluable time teaching them stories from the Word of God. So I can't begin describe to you the feeling of my heart sinking when that official gave us a very firm no.
We returned to our apartment sad and discouraged, and the girls felt the same way upon hearing the news. But we still weren't ready to give up. After all, God was more powerful than this Bolivian government!

For the next three days, we talked to everyone who could possibly help us. We talked to the immigration officials. We talked to lawyers. We talked to our visa runner. We talked to other missionaries. And we talked to God.

But, in the end, we wondered if He was listening.

During those three days, I struggled with faith like I rarely had before. Our friends suggested that we focus on trying to obtain the letters that would allow us to leave the country, rather than pursuing the visas themselves, but that felt like doubting God's power. And, while I didn't doubt whether God could grant us those visas, I did doubt whether He would. And I wondered whether that made me the double-minded man that the Scripture talks about:

"...when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does." (Jas. 1:6-8)

So I prayed and cried out to God for wisdom and for understanding. I read the roll call of faith and was troubled by this passage:

"All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance." (Heb. 11:13)

Did that mean we were not going to receive the visas before we left Cochabamba? I knew that, if that were to come to pass, it would not have been because God had been untrue to His Word but rather because our prayers had somehow been amiss.

But I struggled tremendously with the implications of our prayers being amiss this time. The four of us had been in agreement that this was a word from the Lord and that we were to pray according to that word. And there had been no doubt in my mind that God had taken me directly to Mark 11. If we couldn't hear Him correctly when we were all in agreement, and if I couldn't hear Him when He had spoken to me so clearly through His Word, how could I ever trust that I correctly discern His voice?

On Thursday afternoon, we met with our visa runner, resigned to having to begin the visa process over again in Sucre, and she agreed to accompany us to the immigration office there the next day in the hopes of getting the letter from there before we left the country the following Sunday.

But, as we drove out of Cochabamba without our visas, I felt nothing but despair and doubt, and the one thought that kept going through my mind was this: How could I have misheard my Lord so badly?

The Government is upon His Shoulder (Part II)

Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised:

Leah, Misty, Amy, and I recently spent some time in the community of Ayuma, where our friend Nelly learned two of our stories and is so excited to learn more. (The picture to the left is me telling the story of the birth of Christ to the village women.) In addition, Leah and I went to Sijcha Alta, another nearby village, and shared the birth of Christ with Evarista, who quickly learned it and wants us to return to teach it to her daughters as well. The LORD is at work in these women!

Prayer Necessities for the Skimmers:

1. Please be praying that God would provide for our upcoming missionary training at the end of this year. We have around 15 Bolivian women who have expressed interest in receiving this training that will prepare them to serve as missionaries in their own country and beyond, and we are so excited about that! But we need the funds to train them, and we need for God to specifically call those that He wants to participate. Be in prayer for those things and that these women would persevere in His call despite any difficulties that may arise.

2. Please be in prayer for the women in the communities of Taramarca and Ayuma, where the four of us have been working recently. (I'm pictured here shepherding sheep in Ayuma while Misty talks to Piscinta, one of the local women.) We will be heading to these communities next week to share more stories with the women and to teach them that they are to share them with others. Pray that God will continue to work in the hearts of the women and will embolden them to teach the truth of His Word to those around them who haven't heard.

3. Lift up Evarista and her daughters, who live in Sijcha Alta. (Evarista is pictured below with two of her daughters, Maria and Ana.) Pray that they would learn well the stories of Christ that we are sharing and that they would understand that they are not just to keep them for themselves but are to share them with others.
Bonus for the Readers:

To continue the story of our visa process, in late April, we made the eight-hour drive to the city of Cochabamba to speak with Bolivian immigration officials there about our resident visas. We had been waiting eight months to receive them and were getting ready to leave the country to attend a team-wide meeting in Peru. However, we were apprehensive about doing so because we had just been told we would not be granted the visas in Cochabamba and would have to begin the process over again in Sucre.

When we arrived in Cochabamba, we immediately went to the office of our visa runner. We sat down and listened carefully as she began to explain what had happened. Evidently, in the past, the immigration officials had never verified the applicant's address with a physical visit but, very recently, they had begun sending the local police to confirm that the visa applicant lived where they said they did. And, of course, when they arrived at the address in Cochabamba that we had given (the apartment where we lived during language school), we no longer lived there, and they now thought we had lied about the address.

This was news we expected, and we had come to Cochabamba for this very reason, to try to explain to the immigration officials that we had lived at that address when we first began the visa process but, because it had been eight months, we had since moved to Sucre. However, the next thing our visa runner said was not something I expected. She pulled out a map of Cochabamba and asked me to mark on the map where in the city we lived. She handed me a pen and nodded at me, assuring me that, if I would just mark the spot and make a quick calla to our former landlords, they would be glad to tell the government officials that we still lived there, and we would have our visas within the week.

Here I was, looking at the expectant gaze of this woman who had helped hundreds of people through this very complicated process, feeling the heavy stares of the others on my team as they awaited my decision. We had been waiting eight months for this, and here was this great promise that we'd have it in a week if only we bent the rules this little bit. After all, why shouldn't we? Didn't the Bolivian government, who had been nothing but a barrier to us every step of the way, deserve this? And, really, what difference did it make?

But, even with all of that, the offer wasn't even tempting. I couldn't think of anything besides this verse:

"A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold" (Prov. 22:1).

And I kept thinking of the One Whose name I was really representing:

"We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us" (2 Cor. 5:20).

There was no way I could lie and say we lived in Cochabamba, knowing we were Christ's representatives. So I told our visa runner that I couldn't do it and that we needed to go talk to the government officials instead. She looked at me like I was out of my mind but told us where we needed to go.

After that meeting, the four of us went back to the place where we were saying to rest before going to the immigration office. I pulled out my Bible and began to read from Mark 11. As Jesus was going into Jerusalem with His disciples, He was hungry and went to search for fruit on a fig tree that was in leaf. When He found none, He cursed the tree and, the next morning, Peter pointed out to Jesus how the tree had already withered. And Jesus' response to him just jumped off the page at me:

"I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours" (Mk. 11:23-24).

I read those verses over and over, wondering if the the Lord was telling me what I thought He was telling me. Finally, I read the passage to Leah and Amy, who were both in the room with me. I then asked them, "This government bureaucracy over our visas is really a hindrance to the Lord's work here. Do you think it's a mountain that the Lord is telling us to cast into the sea? Do you think we should ask that He would give us the visas while we're here in Cochabamba?"

Amy immediately responded that she and Misty had just been learning about great faith and told me that the Lord had them both reading about Abraham and his faith. And, when they had finished reading about Abraham, the Lord had told them to go and read about him again. They had both been thinking so much about faith that they had been wondering what God was going to do. Amy was pretty convinced that we should pray that we would receive the visas.

Leah then shared how she had been praying for months that we would receive our visas prior to our team meeting in Peru and how she had been asking her prayer supporters to be praying the same. She, too, was convinced that we should ask God to give us our visas.

When Misty came in later, we asked her what she thought, and she said that she really wanted to see God do something big, something that only He could do. Getting those visas would certainly fit the bill, so we were all in agreement that the Lord was telling us to do this.

So, on that Monday afternoon, Misty, Amy, Leah, and I prayed together as a team, asking that God would grant us our resident visas by Thursday when we left Cochabamba. It was a step of faith for us, but we knew that our God was big enough, and we couldn't wait to see what He would do!

Stay tuned for part III, coming soon to a blog near you... :)