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...

Last night, October 28, 2017, Pastor Antonio Máximo Neto was installed as the first official Brazilian pastor of the Maranatha Baptist Church of Sobradinho.  There were well over 150 people present for the occasion.   It was a joyous day to be able to see the end of a work. Many times missionaries don't get to see the fruit of their labors in a particular place.  We have been in Sobradinho since 2004, thirteen years of service and care. Pastor Máximo and his wife, Lidiane, have two children - Neemias pictured here and Noemi who was sleeping on a pew at the time.  They are from the state of Ceará and he is a graduate of the Cariri Bible Seminary. Deacons of our work's mother church in Casa Nova and area pastors dedicated the new pastor after Pastor Victor Bruno gave a challenge to the pastor with applications for all that were present. Each deacon from the Casa Nova church prayed a specific prayer for various needs of the new pastor as he starts...

Part of the great missionary call is deciding where to go.  When Byron and I went to missionary candidate school way back in 1991, we heard speaker's from many different mission fields talk about the great necessities of their regions.  We were both convinced beforehand that God wanted us to work in the country of Brazil.  We left with the same conviction. BMM Candidate School, 1991 Fast forward 26 years to 2017!  Here we are nearing the end of five terms of missionary service in Northeast Brazil.  We've worked with churches in a big city of millions.  We taught at a MK school.  We helped with a camp ministry.  We've worked with a small congregation in a little interior town.  And now we look towards the future and ask,  What's next?   To help answer that question, Byron recently attended an inter-agency missionary conference near the city of Belém on the mouth of the Amazon River.  He heard about the needs o...

Two months ago our congregation voted to ask a national pastor to come and start work here in Sobradinho.  It was a big decision since in many ways.  The congregation was started almost twenty years ago and has always had some sort of missionary assistance.  We ourselves have been here for close to thirteen years now.  The vote to call a pastor was a little scary for our small group because it meant making a commitment to give regular tithes and offerings to pay the salary of the man or his family will go hungry!  So far, so good!  Giving is okay.  The mother church across the lake is helping and we made a promise to give a good size monthly offering until next year.  But hence the old missionary question arises:  Where are you going now? Seems everywhere I go people ask:  Where are you going?  You aren't leaving, are you?  So going back to the US, hey?  Going to go live near your grandbabies now?  I even had...

Uncle Byron is not at home this week because he is at a conference for missionaries near his old stomping grounds in the state of Pará.  I know that you boys have met Granny Atha and know that she had been a missionary once with Granddad Atha, but you probably have never heard that much about Uncle Byron's time in Brazil as a boy.  He could tell you all about his pet sloth that was so slow that never had to worry about it running away.  They just put it in a tree in the middle of the back yard every night.  Each day it would make for the back wall of their property, but never made it very close.   He could tell you about some of their pet monkeys and the one time he carried a little monkey in his arms on a 24 hour long bus ride from Pará back to the missionary boarding school.   He could tell all about the neighbor who had pigs that would all roll over whenever the man walked by.  He had them all trained to roll over and get their bellies rubbed....

On August 19, one of our MK boys came "home" to Brazil after a long time away.  He came with two beautiful babes and a wonderful young lady in hand, none of which we had met up close and personal.  But you know, blood is thick and it was love at first sight! Our time was short with only the two weeks of Dalton's vacation days from his job, but we made use of every single day to its fullest.  We got to know the mommy of our grandbabies and the love of Dalton's life - Destinie.  We learned all about Paw Patrol and baby food with Chase and Mariyah's help.   Every day was long as we tried to squeeze in lots of bonding and gobs of quality moments... Our house was full of guests every day, lots of laughter and lots of love.  Fifteen glorious days.   Was it worth the long flights and the costs of airfare?  I think we each would say, Oh, Yes!  And hopefully these little grandbabies of missionaries will have a littl...