Cactus Flower

  Lately, it's been just plain hot.  Many days top 100F.  It's that time of the year in our part of Northern Bahia - the hot time.  It's the time when all the old people say things like, It has to get hot to rain, or It's so hot it's going to rain soon.  And it has rained once or twice over the past month.  Farmers get excited and start to prepare their fields, but it isn't quite time yet. Sometimes it's feels like we have been preparing the "field" of our ministry for a long time.  It has been nine years since we made our survey trip all around the region, and eight years since we started weekly visits to our main focus community.   We started with one-day trips, visits, the Jesus film and evangelistic outreaches.  Now, we spend the whole weekend from Friday to Monday.  We host two church services in a rented building.  Byron runs a soccer ministry.  We have home Bible studies with two families.  We make stops along ...

  It's been a while since I made a video letter, and this one took a few days to compile and edit.  Enjoy! Our trip to the States was wonderful, just not long enough!

Our first weekend back in Lage was hard. We were jet-lagged and unsure what to expect. Thankfully, the woman helping with the children still had lessons left in the book I’d given her and agreed to finish them, giving me a break for the first few weeks. Byron jumped right into the Friday and Sunday Bible studies. Saturday afternoon, we visited our faithful friend Jué, grandmother of Max, the boy in a wheelchair near Lage. Byron went to soccer, where more boys showed up than ever! An unsaved man helps with the older boys, and a church teenager has been helping with the younger ones. Our second weekend coincided with the first round of presidential elections. Friday attendance was low, and soccer was cancelled because the school served as a polling place. The Sunday street fair was moved to Saturday. We still hadn’t seen the family who had been attending Bible studies at the church, but we visited Jué again. On Sunday, people kept passing the church on their way to vote. Several question...

Last month we traded the dirt roads of Bahia for the smooth highways of the USA.  We took off four weeks to visit with family, see one son be ordained, visit with another in the new state where he and wife are living and see our youngest grandson turn 4! It was a fast trip, and every day was full to the brim.  So, calling it a "sabbatical" may be a falsehood!  Rest, we did not.  But, refreshed and just a little renewed, I think we are.  Stay tuned over the next week as I finish up a video letter all about our trip. The funny thing about such trips is the desire to plan the next one right way!  Does that take away from my call to missions?  No, not in the least, but it does make me consider how often we need to "go home" and "take a break" from what we do without the need to visit all our churches. Furlough and sabbatical are not synonyms.  Furlough means visiting a different church every week.  Sabbatical is supposed to mean rest.  I hop...

  This is from our latest prayer letter written by Byron and sent out to our churches and supporters. Why did the chicken cross the road? There are endless answers to the riddle, but it seems like a silly question to most people today. Living in a foreign country can sometimes open your eyes to things in your own culture that have been forgotten. Like chickens running loose in yards that suddenly and desperately want to be on the other side of the road. Chickens who are as equally certain they are faster than your car as they are wrong. Ever wonder where the idea for flat chicken patties came from?   “Rain drops keep falling on my head” takes on new meaning in houses in most of the world as many roofs get some splatter in a heavy rain and don’t have ceilings to absorb it. You can also learn a lot about your language by learning another. All that silly grammar stuff starts making a little more sense and even some words take on new meaning. Here are some examples I’v...

  Been feeling sort of well, old lately.  Yup, old.  I look at myself in the mirror and see wrinkles and crinkles.  In November I'll pass the 60 mark and hit 61.  I guess it's time to consider I may be older than I think.   Time has a funny way to getting ahead of itself and running away with all our plans before we even get there.   It just seems like yesterday that I was making curtains for the boys' new bedroom in our house in Sobradinho.  Now I'm trying to decide what to do with all the stuff they left behind:  toys, books, computer game discs, inline skates et cetera. Little by little, I guess it's time to face the facts and start preparing for the not so distant future.  I've already started cleaning out drawers and going through toys this past year, but I got stuck somewhere in the middle of all the memories and decided to leave it for a rainy day. Ah, but alas, it doesn't rain much in the desert Northeast.

  This month's video letter is not real long and it is a little bit late, but it's here and that's what counts.  Find out about what we've been up to by clicking the play button below.  Hang on to your hat!