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?