Cactus Flower

You know that road you see every day but you've never been down it and don't know where it goes?  That's how our trip started out, heading down a path less taken and coming home by a road few would dare to pass.   On Tuesday, November 14, we headed out to find as many "unreached" communities within 150 miles of where we currently live.  Our method was simple:  Stop and Ask!  Most of the places where we visited are not marked on any of the maps we own.  Some are identified on Google Maps.  Most all are on dirt roads - either roads that have always been dirt or old highways in need of repaving.   At each group of more than ten houses we stopped to ask the name of the community, took note of how many houses there were and asked about churches.  We visited about 200 such communities over the course of our trip of seven days.   Going was slow due to the bad roads and all the stopping.  Few places have any sort of sign id...

On Monday, November 13, Byron and I head off on another crazy trip.  Where are we going this time?  Glad you asked!  We are heading for the middle of our state of Bahia.  Below is what our route might look like... Most of the roads we take will look like the one above -  dirt and dust!   If you remember the post about the least evangelized people groups in Brazil, this area is right up there on the list - the hot, dry, desert Northeast.  But as Byron found out on his trip to the Amazon, it would seem that many statisticians haven't physically visited the areas about which they report.  Byron saw many churches in the cities along the rivers that he visited.  Definitely some were not high quality and certainly there are places with no churches at all, but the Bible is around in the Amazon. We've done some research about the places we will visit this next week.  Presbyterians have had works in this region since the 1...