God is at work in Salvatierra! The believers are being faithful and maturing in the faith, and God is sending more non-believers to our nightly meetings. May His Name be praised as He continues to build His Church among these people!
Prayer Necessities:
1. Please pray for wisdom for Leah and me as we deal with the many requests of the people in this village. There are so many medical and other types of needs that it's just impossible to meet them all, nor do we want to create jealousy or increased dependence on outsiders in these people. Just ask that God would give us wisdom to know how and when to meet different needs.
2. Pray that the Lord would continue to build His Church in this village and that He would raise up elders who will be able to guard them against the "savage wolves" who will come in trying to spread false teachings (see Acts 20). (I'm pictured here with one of the believers, Adela, and her two youngest daughters.)
3. Pray that Leah and I would be focused and efficient on our last two trips to Salvatierra and that we would not turn our hearts toward the United States just yet. We really want to be "all there" in these last few months of our mission here in Bolivia, and we need His help to do that!
Inquiring Minds Wanna Know:
This transition in the last few months of my mission term has been, in many ways, a new beginning. I've had to develop relationships with new people, learn parts of a new culture and language, and adjust to living life in a hot and humid climate in the sea-level jungle rather than a cold and dry one in the high altitude of the Andes Mountains.
In many ways, I enjoy the life with the Guarayo in Salvatierra better than life with the Quechua. The Guarayo don't really have to work very hard to make their staple crops of yucca and plantains grow. The jungle sunlight and plentiful water will make them grow, so their main responsibilities involve planting and harvesting. And even those two things don't have to occur at any specified times, just whatever days they feel like getting up and going to their fields. What a change from the hard-working Quechua, who are constantly cultivating their fields in a desperate effort to make the rocky ground produce their food.
The Guarayo, like the Quechua, a
lso have animals - sheep, pigs, cows. The difference is that the Guarayo can just let them roam free in the abundant grass around the village, so there's no need to spend all day out of the home taking care of them. The people do work - washing clothes by hand, making chicha (a drink made from yucca), cleaning their houses, cutting grass with their machetes, hunting wild pigs and fishing - but they have a lot of down time, too. That also gives Leah and me a lot of time to study Bible stories, to read, or to write our next blogs. :) (This is me cutting the grass outside our house.)We have church meetings every evening, and that is always the most encouraging time of the day! One of the believers is currently out of town, but the other three are almost always there. In addition, we usually have a few non-believers who come to hear the stories, though it's never the same group on any given night. We start by telling the story in Spanish and, after, a few times, we ask one of them to tell it in Guarayo. We know that they've gotten the story pretty well if they can translate it into their own language.
My favorite part of the meetings comes at the end of the story when we ask questions about what they learned. From their answers, we get to hear what the Holy Spirit is teaching them, and it never fails to teach me something, too.
On this trip, we taught a group of stories from the life of Jesus with the goal of teaching them as new believers how to be disciples of Christ, as well as some of the basics on being the church. The stories included church discipline, prayer, the end times, the Holy Spirit, and the Great Commission. Quite a broad range, huh? :)
But our favorite part of the church meetings were the discussion times after the stories. We always ask questions about the stories, but I love it when they branch off from the questions and start discussing the story among themselves.
The story of the end times probably generated the most discussion. It was compiled from Matthew 24 and Luke 21 and, as we started talking about the false prophets that will appear in the last days, we began to discuss what true prophets look like in this day and age. I went home so encouraged that night after seeing the curiosity and hunger to know Truth that is manifested in the lives of these new believers, not to mention how the Holy Spirit is at work in them to reveal His Truth!
So thank you for your prayers for this new church. The new believers are being faithful in obedience and maturing in the faith, and the nightly meetings are getting bigger as more people are coming. Praise Him for how He is building His Church among the Guarayo in Salvatierra!
Our jungle house in Salvatierra
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