Saturday, March 30, 2013

Our First "Ladies Retreat" in Puerto Rico.

Our Ladies held their first Ladies Retreat today. We rented out a Fishing Club building along side a pretty lake, set the theme as "A Wise Woman Builds Her House. Prov. 14:1,"  made plans for a nice dinner and sent out the invitations.

Tina, who was the MC of the event, said that the ladies were a bit nervous that  maybe no one would come, or maybe we would be overwhelmed with too many.  But it urned out to be just perfect. About 58 came, representing women form about 5 churches and their guests.

We had special music, great messages from Omayra Roman-Ponce, the wife of a Bible College college colleague of mine, a fine dinner and wonderful fellowship.

A few of us men did come along to set up and serve the ladies.

I am so glad that the women of our church are taking their part of our church's ministry so seriously and doing such a tremendous job in reaching out to others.

Thank you ladies! You did a tremendous job and our church is better for it!

PS Here is a video clip showing the ladies listening to a very pretty special sung by one of our college girls, Adaia Portugal.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Extending Ourselves Through Others

Meet a serious Quechua indian, Julio. I helped train Julio for the ministry, which in his case was to return to the Bolivian-Brazilian border area and start churches there.

Julio representes a challenge, an opportunity and a blessing.

The Challenge: He seems to be very unlike me in a number of ways. He is a very serious man. He is a martial arts instructor who runs something like 5 miles, does 300 pushups a day and has some martial art schools he runs in Bolivia. He also speaks Quechua (an ancient Incan indian dialect) as his primary language, so I,  an English speaker, had to teach him things like Biblical Greek in Spanish, which he then processed in his own mind into Quechua. That year was tough on both of us, but we both survived.

Teaching someone very unlike yourself is a challenge. but it also turned out to be an opportunity and a blessing.

The Opportunity: Julio came back to Puerto Rico looking for missionary support for church planting in some pretty tough areas of South America. besides speaking in a lot of churches, he has volunteered to work on construction projects and then accept any love offerings that the people are led to make. We were blessed to be able to help him and he did some amazing work, like re-cementing and painting our carport roof, putting in 12 hour days and doing an incredible amount of work. He is doing the same all over the island, hoping to return with funds to help his new ministry.

He is physically tough, mentally focused and spiritually dedicated to build churches.  He is also uniquely equipped to deal with a culture and a language very alien to our own. He can go places we would not be able to enter and is equipped to do things that we would not do nearly as well as he can do them.

The Blessing: In Julio and students like him, we find our ministry of reaching the Latino people for Christ is reaching into new areas and multiple languages. We find that good discipleship really extends and expands the work and effectiveness of missions.

Please pray for Julio and help us help him and others like him. Your  support is a blessing that enables us to help him and, through discipleship, multiply the blessing and pass it along to others.



Sunday, March 17, 2013

When Teaching Others Might Save Your Own Life...


Besides our busy schedule church planting, Bible College teaching and being a Civil Air Patrol Chaplain, I have the opportunity to give devotionals and also to teach things to young teens in a Christian school near our home.

We had a CPR class the other day and the kids loved it. A health care worker was able to bring some training aids. I demonstrated to the kids the proper technique while she talked them through the steps. I do teach these kids God's plan of salvation, Bible lessons and about how to live the Christian life.This is all really great. But now they know how to do CPR.

Being a missionary certainly does not pay well, but it has it's benefits. Besides the spiritual benefits of teaching others God's Word, I am now teaching in a room full of people who could save my life if I had a heart attack!

 You never know, but when you help others, you just might be helping yourself.