A great week Translating and Ministering

It has been an amazing week of serving the Lord and assisting one of the local churches. The baptist church in Mera, a town close to Shell, contacted me about helping them with translating for a missions group that was coming to their church. It was a great time of fellowship, evangelism and serving the Lord together!

The team consisted of 35 people from Temple Baptist Church in Springdale, Arkansas, that came down to minister alongside the local church for a week. There were two doctors, the youth group which had prepared a few dramas for evangelism, and a bunch of brothers and sisters willing to serve God in whatever way the he saw fit to use them during that week.

We visited a number of places during the week, and for the most part I was translating with the doctors, as this was the place of most need. There were a few nationals that know english and helped translating as well, and so that made it a lot easier than just one person translating for 35! The first village that we visited last Friday, Agua Santa, we had to cross the rushing Pastaza river on a tarabita to reach it. The tarabita was actually a very good one, large and fairly new, and we were able to cross with 6 people at a time. (A tarabita is a gondola type basket hanging on wires and used to cross large chasms or swift rivers, powered by small motors...this one in particular was using a truck motor to move the heavy gondola the several hundred yards of distance to cross the river.) We spent the later half of the morning and the first part of the afternoon in this village. Late Friday afternoon the team visited Casa de Fe for an hour or so, bringing a snack and spending time playing with the kids there....it was a really enjoyable time!

On Saturday we went to Puyopongo in the morning, and the squatters village outside of Shell in the afternoon. The ministry that we did was fairly much the same as Friday, but several things really stood out to me that I would like to share. In the morning, one of the young ladies that I talked to after translating for the doctor(we took turns sharing the gospel after their visit with the doctor, and praise the Lord had a number of conversions in each village to give to the care of the church that was meeting in each respective village) she shared how she had fallen away from her belief in God, because of some very harsh words spoken to her from a pastors wife. In the afternoon at the squatters village, a young mother brought her 11 year old daughter asking for some medicine, because her daughter wouldn't eat, couldn't sleep, and had day and nightmares. After asking a few questions, she shared how her daughter had been raped by one of her teachers at school. We were able to give her contact information for the pastor of one of the local churches so that he could help her further.

Sunday we attended the church in Mera, where I was able to translate for the pastor visiting from the states his Fathers Day service. On Tuesday we travelled 4 hours to the Napo river to some Huaroni communities and were able to minister to them. It was a very long day (I left at 4 in the morning and arrived home around 8 at night), and even with the setbacks and landslides blocking the paths, it was very fulfilling and well worth it. on Wednesday evening I was able to translate for them in a small church plant on the outskirts of the city of Puyo, where we had a great time of worshipping the Lord and a great message that I was able to translate from English to Spanish for the congregation.

It was an incredible week of ministering to these villages, working alongside the local churches in these villages and a team of brothers and sisters from the states. We had over 40 people commit their lives to the Lord. It was truly an amazing and life changing time for many, including the two ladies whose stories I mentioned. And, as sad and extreme as they may sound, these stories that I shared are not at all uncommon. As a matter of fact, almost every week we run into stories like these. People turned away from God by church leaders who are bound by legalism or by not knowing the whole word of God. People living in despair, bound by chains, and kept in the darkness, thinking that this is the way they must live their lives, tricked by the Father of Lies. These are the people that we reach out to with Gods love and care, to heal their hurts and restore their lives, to place them in a body that teaches the true word of God. These are the leaders that we are training, so that they may reach out through evangelism and social works in their own communities, and the communities surrounding them.

Thank you for your support of our ministry here. We are able to reach the lost with the gospel, and assist the local churches in their efforts of evangelism and children ministry. God is doing great things in these parts, we are honored to partner with you and to be used by him!!

You can see a video of the pictures taken during the trip here.