Leah and I received our two-year residency visas last week! We will not be here for two years longer, but we are glad to have in our hands the documentation we need to be able to legally live in Bolivia until our mission term ends in May of next year.
Prayer Necessities:
1. Please continue to pray for our friend Nelly, who continues to have some health problems. Despite several visits to doctors and a few rounds of antibiotics, she still has intermittent abdominal pain that remains unresolved. She is often worried about this, so please pray that the Lord would resolve this and that she would trust Him with her health.
2. Be praying for our friend Sabina, who lives in Ayuma. She is a non-believer and is well-known for her drinking and for making the local alcoholic beverage for others to drink. We have heard that she says she will just drink herself into the grave, but we have had an opportunity to build a friendship with her. We got the chance to share the Gospel with her through Quechua Bible stories this past weekend, so please pray that His Word would touch her heart and bring her to salvation.
3. Please pray for Leah and me as we very soon make the transition into working with another people group, the Guarayo, in October or November.
Inquiring Minds Wanna Know:
The second weekend of our women's conference was August 13 and 14, and the results were not what we had hoped. When we began this conference, we had the intention of teaching seven stories from Scripture over the course of three weekends. The goal was for the women to learn the stories, then to go home and share them with at least one other person.
We had made those expectations very clear and had told them that we would be asking two questions when they arrived on August 13: 1) Did they still remember the stories? and 2) With whom did they share them?
We knew that most people would not share the stories, but we were hoping for a few who would. When we got there, we asked the two questions. When we asked the first question, several of the women raised their hands, and we were excited. Then we asked who all had shared the stories, and there were still a few hands raised. But, when we began to ask them individually with whom they had shared, only one person could say that she had shared the stories.
But we were excited about the one! Yhovana is 17 and had shared both stories with her mom and with two friends from school. Wow! We gave her a can of milk as a reward (milk is kind of a precious commodity in the village), and we also gave milk to Nelly, who had missed learning the second story but had shared the first one with her family.
We then set about teaching the next story - the story of God testing Abraham's faith by asking him to sacrifice Isaac. Just like the previous week, it was very obvious that many of the women were not interested at all, but there were a few, including Nelly and Yhovana, who were really trying. Leah asked for Nelly's husband Oscar and one of the local boys, Luis, to come up and help her as she told the story (in the picture below, Luis is to the far left and Oscar is beside him as Leah teaches the story), and they played the parts of Abraham and Isaac. I think it was a really great visual for them to get to see what it might have looked like for a man to sacrifice his son. Afterwards, the question time went really well, as one of the women confessed that, if God had asked this of her, she would not have been able to sacrifice her child. And Yhovana offered the insight of the night, as she told us that, just as He did with Abraham, God also wants to test each of us to know whether or not we will obey Him. We went to bed that night truly encouraged by Yhovana and Nelly, who continued to impress with their quickness to learn and willingness to share what they had learned.
But Sunday brought great discouragement when Yhovana didn't show up to learn the story. We had seen her at her house that morning and knew she was healthy, so we didn't know what happened. It was my turn to teach, and I just looked around at everyone and wondered why exactly we were doing this when no one really seemed to care. But Leah encouraged me by reminding me that, even if everyone around us was disobedient, we still had to give our all. Our great God deserved that.
I knew she was right, so I got up to teach the story of the woman at the well from John 4, determined to give my best effort in teaching it. It is an incredible story that always touches my heart so, after the second time of telling it, I was really into it. In acting the story out in front of the women gathered there, I really thought about what that woman must have thought when Jesus told her He was the Messiah, this long-awaited One Who knew everything she had ever done... and yet still promised to give her living water. I knew how excited she was to meet Him, and it made me remember the excitement that I had - and still have -
when I really meet with Him and feel that spring of living water flowing inside of me.
Among the 40 women or so who were gathered there, I could see a few who were really interested. There was one woman in particular, a lady named Ines, who would crane her head as I moved, just to be sure she could see what I was doing. It was encouraging to know there was someone who really wanted to know this awesome story of love and forgiveness, so I focused most of my attention on her and the few others who were interested (pictured here are Nelly sitting down by the "well" as Jesus and Noelia as the Samaritan woman, while I help coach them with the story).
At the end, I asked several questions about the story. One of the questions was about what the Samaritan woman did after Jesus told her He was the Messiah. The answer? She went back to her town and told everyone to come and hear Jesus. When we talked about that, Ines spoke up and explained that they didn't have time to go and tell others. They were all so busy cooking and washing clothes and working in their fields that there just wasn't time to go and tell the Catholics about Jesus. (Ines is pictured below with me as we go through the story of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well.)
That might have been the most discouraging thing I heard that weekend, but I know I do the same thing. I get so caught up in what I want or "need" to do that I don't take the time to tell others the Good News, that the Messiah has come and offered us living water so that we might never be thirsty again. When Ines said that, I wondered how the 5% of Quechua people who are believers can withhold such a valuable truth from the 95% of their people who don't know it? And I wonder how can I withhold it from so many around me who also don't know Him?
Scripture tells us this:
"Be very careful, then, how you live - not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil" (Eph. 5:15-16).
Since our lives are nothing longer than a vapor and then are over, let's heed this advice. Let's spend ourselves in His service, making Him known and telling everyone about the living Water. There is NOTHING we do that is more important!
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