Cactus Flower

This Sunday, July 19, marks four months of quarantines and lockdowns, travel restrictions and regulations that have kept us mostly at home, and hesitant to visit our interior Bible study students. Intermittent internet hasn't helped much with keeping in touch with our interior friends, but we are exchanging regular messages.   This week we decided to check out another nearby dirt path not too far from home.  Our county's regulations are opening up.  Sadly several of the county's on our old route are still closed. So Sunday afternoon we went off to find the petroglyphs or ancient wall drawings of São Gonçalo da Serra.   There are not a lot of signs!  You can't find it on Google Maps doesn't tell you everything. But for the persistent, there is success. We had to turn around a few times.  We had to stop and ask a few times.  We just had to keep moving along and hoping. Even after we found the entrance of this mountain pas...

The photos from my cell phone are in chronological order starting with March 18th, the day our town "shut down" for the coronavirus. I started praying for people that would be affecting by the Covid-19 Crisis. That was 52 days ago.  I spent the first five weeks of the crisis with the help of two friends developing Bible studies for our Umbrella Prayer friends.  I basically cooked, cleaned a little, studied, edited and published and promoted our virtual study events for five weeks. In between times I petted our three dogs a lot.  They were very happy to have us at home all day long!  I tried to fix happy and creative meals. Brazilian Baião de Dois, a beans and rice dish with cheese.   Here's the basic recipe:  https://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-detail.asp?recipe=1718284 Here we are smiling and happy.  I didn't sleep so well the first few weeks, and still have a hard time some nights.  But, I can be thankful for a basicall...

This study was presented for a virtual event on April 24, 2020 in the middle of the "Great Quarantine" here in Brazil.  It was meant to encourage women who were asking questions about biblical end times' events. If you have upon this blog, feel free to read the devotional and use it as you need. 

I'm not really sure when I first heard the word.  When I did it seemed far away and remote, not very likely to cross the big ocean and come into my little interior, middle of nowhere, world.  Little by little it started getting closer and closer to "home."  Byron and I were in the interior for a two day trip.  I had already informed our family that we would be out of touch for about 24 hours.  We left for a little place called Várzea Grande where we showed the Jesus Film on a Wednesday night.  Our "crowd" was small, but so was the community!  We actually had around a 90% turnout and all were very attentive.   We planned to spend the night car camping off a little used road and head on to our regular Bible study students in Lage dos Negros on Thursday.  The family that hosted the film insisted that we stay with them.  They gave us a good supper and a nice breakfast the next morning. March 12, 2020 Lage dos Negros The next day w...