Cactus Flower

During our wild month of Stateside tourism with our Brazilian neighbors we visited the NC Transportation Museum in Spencer NC.  It was a bitterly cold day!  But we all had a great time.  It was especially interesting for me since it was one of the stops I would always take my fourth graders way back in the day when I taught school before going to Brazil.  Fourth graders had to study North Carolina history and Spencer was a good place for a field trip even twenty plus years ago. As we walked about we came upon this lovely red antique pick-up with the word "Believe" on the windshield.  The truck caught my attention as I'd been thinking on what would be my key word for 2018.  "Hope" got repeated for me in 2014 and 2015.  My hope was renewed in 2016 when we saw our middle son get saved and right with the Lord.  I'm not entirely sure if I had chosen a particular word that year but "Grateful" and "Peace" were often on my mind all of the fa...

On December 7th we hit the ground running in Washington DC for this fifth furlough of our 25+ years of service in Brazil.  Tagging along with us were our best pals from Sobradinho... We did everything you can imagine that a Brazilian in the winter time in the USA would want to see and do... It was an unique change-up to our normal routine with lots of sightseeing and activity.   Andressa and Jonas shared in family holiday fun and got to meet almost all of our immediate family on both sides and then some! Things are quiet in the missions house today.  This week Byron will start scheduling meetings with our supporting churches and we will soon hit the roads to visit each one over the course of the next six months. 

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...