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.
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.
