Many of the long-term missionaries were able to gather for a very good day of meetings. We sought God together for unity, and to try to understand together His direction for our future. We know there are spiritual attacks that are doing all they can to fracture and weaken us in whatever ways possible, but as we talk together, and pray together, God strengthens us. It would have been nice if others of the team could have been there too, but with travels and furlough it doesn’t always work out. I look forward to the day when we can have an annual large-group meeting with some key Brazilian leaders too, as we continue to learn to pass the challenges of working together in a foreign country as servant-leaders.

Rich Nathan and Craig Heselton once talked to me about the value of committing to being a life-long learner. The longer I am in leadership, the more I see the wisdom of this commitment.

“I made many poor decisions as a young person, but one good decision I made was to go work in Africa, where I met my husband, Phil.”

“I grew up in England. I met Jen in Africa. When Jen’s sister invited us to Alpha, I didn’t want to go. Since Jen was going, I decided I would tag along to see if I was missing something.”

Jen and Phil shared their testimonies with the first Alpha Group at our church last night. They met each other in Africa, and they came to know Jesus because of an Alpha course in Canada.

In 2012, while Phil and Jen were raising support to become missionaries in the Amazon, they travelled to England, to Phil homeland. While in England the Snells met with the Alpha representative for Brazil. They were encouraged to discover it was already translated into Portuguese. Now we are hosting our first Alpha course here in Marabá.

Last night was a great example of how God is using new missionaries, who are still struggling to learn the language. Phil and Jen have not even been here one year yet. Art and Cyndi, who are starting the English Learning school, cooked the first meal.  Everyone who was there enjoyed the first evening, and it feels to us leaders that this is exactly what our young church his needing at this time.

Emma and Bella look at our yard through a  camera lens.

We can see how God likes the idea of transformations.

We just had a debriefing meeting about Cristovál.

Hightlights include:

1. The growing sense of community. Everyone helping everyone else to win their team events, and especially during the two big races.
2. Their were more adults and families participating than ever before.
3. We have such good cooks in our midst.
4. We have more leaders to help than ever before.
5. Art and Aline did an excellent job coordinating the game events.

For me, a great highlight was how God healed Nailson’s foot. A week ago Nailson was at our door with a 26 oz. bottle of cachaça, that he was drinking straight out of the bottle. Our neighbour, two doors down, was stabbed and killed in the night, while trying to break up a fight. Her family wanted to go to the graveyard to bury her body, but no-one had a vehicle. Would we take them?

A week later I saw him hobbling down the road on crutches. I pulled over, and found that he was sober. He had punctured his foot with a nail. He was sober because the doctors gave him some strong medicine and told him he could not drink alcohol. I invited him to come spend the week-end with us for the Cristovál event.

The first night Chris Wiens preached. Then he invited people up for healing. Nailson hobbled up, leaning heavily on his cane to lessen the pain from his injured foot. Chris invited the children to come up and pray for him. Over about 5 minutes, the pain completely left his foot, and the swelling went down some. Nailson did not need the cane anymore. Over the next day and night the swelling went away completely, and Nailson was keen to enter into the races. “The only bad part about this week-end is that I didn’t get to enter the big mud race yesterday. If it was today, I would be running”.

I don’t have a “before” photo, but you can see all the wrinkles on his foot from how big the swelling was. He could barely fit into his flip flop sandal. It was about double in size.