Little steps

During the past several months, Sarah has shared different Bible stories with her deaf sign language tutor, Patrícia. While she has listened respectfully to each account, she has never expressed any further spiritual interest. Yesterday, Sarah felt that it was the time to pull out all the stops and simply confront her with the gospel. And so, that’s exactly what she did. Carefully making connections with the other stories she had shared before (Creation, the Fall, the flood, Abraham, etc.), she presented Jesus Christ as the promised Savior who gave His life to save all who would believe. This was not a glossed over presentation of the gospel. It was careful, thoughtful, and loving. Finally, Sarah asked Patrícia what she thought about all of this. Her response was rather nonchalant, and it basically boiled down to, “I don’t really care.” While we understand people usually don’t accept the gospel the first time they hear it, we did hope for a better response than that. Even so, we will continue to love her, pray for her, and share the gospel with her. God can open blind eyes and penetrate hard hearts.

In the afternoon, I went to the community center where I tutor kids in English. As we were talking about the recent holiday of Carnaval, one of the girls announced, “I don’t like Carnaval at all, and I also don’t like Easter.” While I agree with her completely on the first count, I wondered about her strong opinion of Easter. I asked her, “Why don’t you like Easter?” “Well, I just don’t see the point. It’s just eggs and stuff,” she replied. I couldn’t hold back my enthusiasm as I said, “Easter this best day of the year because it’s when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” I continued briefly sharing the gospel story with her. She listened and the said, “I kind of knew that, but I just didn’t know how it had anything to do with Easter and eggs and everything.” Pray that this girl will soon have a heart understanding of what Jesus’ resurrection means.

We appreciate your prayers for our building search process. We have cleared several hurdles, and now all we need to do is sign the papers and begin to get the building ready for opening day. God willing, our first Sunday service will be April 7th. This is a huge step. We are thankful that God is opening this door, and we are prayerful that this building will be a powerful tool in our effort to reach Montijo with the gospel.

As I am typing this, Sarah is teaching her first lesson in “Religion and Morality” class at one of the high schools here in town. Pray that God that this ministry would be fruitful, and that Sarah would be able to connect with many students there.

Wherever you are reading this at, know that we are deeply grateful for your interest in what God is doing here in our corner of the world.

Prayer and Praise

The past couple of weeks have been different than we expected. Sarah spent a total of nine days in the hospital with an abscess in her kidney, Thankfully, she is home again, and feeling much better. We have been greatly encouraged by the many encouraging e-mails and calls during this challenging time. We have found that this trying experience has showed us just how how precious it is to have the encouragement of brothers and sisters in Christ.

During the past months, we have asked for prayer as we look for a place to rent for the church plant. Things have been moving forward during the past several days, and we are particularly interested in one building. The owner has lowered the price to within our budget, and from our perspective it seems to be a good choice. Please pray that God would make things clear whether or not we should move forward with this building or if we should wait for another place. 

Is this the place?