I think one of the challenges is that we humans easily settle into leader and follower roles.
A) The transition from someone who started as a follower to
B) Becoming a peer who
C) Makes some decisions differently than you and who
D) Will sometimes fail because they didn’t follow your counsel is
E) Fraught with awkwardness, and
F) The way forward is through.
The church leaders in Gurupá wanted to show us the fruit of their Discovery Group evangelism. Discovery Group evangelism differs from traditional evangelism in that participants are invited to actively participate in the learning. Participants invite their friends, share highlights and difficulties of their week, and learn to read and apply Bible stories to their daily lives. Over time Discovery Groups sometimes join together to form congregations. The group in the photos below is in a marginalized neighborhood called Areião (ARR ray oww) now meets weekly as a new congregation, but they have no building yet. Many people in the photo are from the larger Central church who came for the special celebration.
This is the courageous young single lady leading the church plant in Areiao.
Some youth travel by boat to a remote creek to facilitate Discovery Groups at several locations. Most remote people here love getting visits from city people, which makes it relatively easy to start Discovery Groups. It is also a challenge to learn how to keep sustainably growing; to encourage the receivers to become givers and propagators.
Later, they all went swimming in the Amazon. Bella is fluent in Portuguese, so we didn’t need to go with them. On the other hand, sending your daughter to a remote location is emotionally more difficult than going there yourself. I imagine all missionary parents can relate.
We experienced the great joy of traveling with an adult daughter and her husband to visit churches we helped to plant along the Xingu River.  We hire a taxi or a cart to haul our travel gear to the church in Gurupá. This year many of the freight people upgraded to customized motorbike carts.  We took a barge down to Gurupá. It took about 14 hours. We traveled home on motorboats in about 5 hours, not counting stopping for lunch with the pastors in Porto de Moz.  We had lunch with Bene and Iana, (Eee Yana) on our way home, and with Valdinho and his family. Valdinho was one of the first people I met in Porto de Moz, back in 1995. We have traveled the church-planting road together for many years. In recent years Valdinho has embraced trading a strong authoritarian leadership style for the Discovery Group model. Here is a photo Valdinho sent me of his Discovery Group the weekend of this photo, April 22, 2023.   One night in Gurupá Deanna and I spoke at a Couple’s Event. The youth arrived in the afternoon to cook a big supper, and 40 couples came for an evening of fun and learning at the church.  After two days in Gurupá we put our things back in a motorcycle cart and started the journey home.  It took two days of motorboat and car travel to get back to our home in Marabá.  The port in Gurupá. |
A church from across town used our facilities on Easter Weekend for a leadership retreat.
Here is a short clip from the leadership retreat.
Jambo blossoms will turn into a red fruit that tastes like strawberries and apples, with a twist.
I am still in touch with many of these friends.
I think God, in His blessings, redeems our memories.
I have the best memories of my seven years in the Yukon.
I could tell long stories about each photo.
“Big Charlie” was the chief of a band the last time I talked to his son, a couple of years ago. He ran the generators that provided electricity for Destruction Bay when I lived there.
Destruction Bay had a one-room schoolhouse with 12 students in grades 1-8. We also had a gas station, hotel, one RCMP, two park rangers, a post office lady, and a road maintenance crew of five. I started at the gas station and moved to the highway maintenance crew over time.
My truck is the blue one. We’re going prospecting.
My friend, Al, was still gold mining the last time I talked with him. While I lived in Destruction Bay, I helped him stake placer claims. We are prospecting here, but when Al found color, he soon moved his Cat and sluice boxes in.
This is Bella’s first trip home in seven years! Bella is our youngest daughter and married Tim Nielsen in June 2022. And everyone is delighted to meet Tim.
Many of Bella’s friends from church are still faithful.
Bella organized a painting for her friend’s children.
Tim, Ariela, Douglas, Anna, and Bella
Then their numbers decreased,
and they were humbled by oppression,
he who pours contempt on nobles
made them wander in a trackless waste.
But he lifted the needy out of their affliction
and increased their families like flocks.
The upright see and rejoice,
but all the wicked shut their mouths.
Let the one who is wise heed these things
and ponder the loving deeds of the Lord.
I lived in Destruction Bay, Yukon, for three winters, from 19-22. It was very cold. It is in the shadow of huge mountains, so for three months in winter, we could see the sunshine on the mountains across the lake, but we remained in the shadow. In summer, on the other hand, we had bright daylight all night long. The community of 32 people celebrated June 21st by starting a baseball game at midnight and ending hours later with barbecued t-bone steaks at the community hall. While I have many good memories of those years, it was also a season of binge drinking and excess, leading to a complete personal crisis for me and returning to God. When I committed my life to God 100%, I thought I had given up all fun and my life would turn dreary until I got to heaven. I was so wrong.
Life with Jesus has been vibrant and colorful, but I wonder how it would have been without the desert experience.
Forty years later, I overheard my mom describing their journey as I strayed farther from how I was raised. “Then he moved to Destruction Bay.” For her, it symbolized a prodigal son season of utter chaos. Thankfully Mom and Dad got many friends from their church to pray for me, and those prayers became pillars in our missionary support team ten years later.
This week I realized that the prodigal son becomes the child the father always wanted (Luke 15:11-32).
The son who did everything right struggled with entitlement and a judgemental critical spirit.
To be clear, I am not suggesting we intentionally engage with sin to experience God’s grace. Not at all. But God tailors special desert experiences for each of His children. He hopes to draw closer to them through these experiences, but many get hung up fighting their way around the trials. The way forward is through.
God is working hard to develop humans who will reign for eternity.
The Bible teaches us about God’s processes through stories. Consider three people from near the end of the book of Genesis.
Rebekah was highly capable and loved serving. She watered all of Abraham’s servant’s camels and then left her parents to journey to a far land to marry a stranger. Imagine the courage and the capacity to make things happen. But it got her in trouble.
When Rebekah was pregnant with twins, she prayed, and God told her the older son would serve the younger son (Gen. 25:32).
The Lord said to her,
“Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples from within you will be separated;
one people will be stronger than the other,
and the older will serve the younger.”
(Gen. 25:23)
Rebekah conspired with her favorite younger son to deceive her husband to make God’s will happen. Her husband was blind in his old age. Jacob was hesitant, not because it was the wrong thing to do, but because he might get caught.
Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, “But my brother Esau is a hairy man while I have smooth skin. What if my father touches me? I would appear to be tricking him and would bring down a curse on myself rather than a blessing” (Gen. 27:11-12).
Courageous Rebekah said, “It’s all on me.” She took it upon herself to fulfill God’s plans through deception, manipulation, and power-over. We never hear from her again.
Jacob continually struggled to get God’s blessing through human striving. Even near the end, he was upset with his sons for revealing to the Egyptian ruler they had a brother. One brother had to offer his children as a pledge so they could get more food in Egypt. He is one of the big three patriarchs, but one can see him crawling over the finish line.
And Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty. My years have been few and difficult, and they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers” (Gen. 47:9).
Joseph, like Rebekah, gets a prophecy from God about the future.
Then Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. He said to them, “Please listen to this dream which I have had; for behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and lo, my sheaf rose up and also stood erect; and behold, your sheaves gathered around and bowed down to my sheaf.” Then his brothers said, “Are you going to reign over us? Or are you really going to rule over us?” So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words
(Gen. 37:5-8)
Joseph tells his brothers about his dream. They got furious. This is similar to Abel, who gave an acceptable offering to God, and his brother got furious. Giving the right offering or receiving God’s plan for your life is still a good idea. If we do not tell others what God has called us to do, we risk losing our call, forgetting our dream, and becoming normal.
Joseph’s brothers are slightly better than Cain. They narrowly avoid killing their brother, instead selling him into a lifetime of slavery.
The Bible gives a strong sense that Joseph embraced his chaos season, the season when nothing makes sense. Since Joseph embraced what he could not change, God blessed him. This reminds me of the famous Serenity Prayer.
Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed;
courage to change that which can be changed,
and wisdom to know the one from the other,
through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
Of the three persons compared in this study, Joseph thrived to the end.
Leão pointed me in the direction of “the second most dangerous neighborhood in Gurupá” so I went for a walk. On the other side of that neighborhood, I found a trail through the bush. I walked down that trail for a mile or two until I met a guy on a bicycle. He told me the trail goes all the way to Porto de Moz. The trail was full of jungle flowers, and if you come to visit maybe we can arrange a trip so can see it.
Someone was drying cacao beans on one of the paved streets in town. This is where chocolate comes from.
Bomeliads and orchids grow wild and live off of other trees.
If you look at the bark on this tree, you will see many diagonal scars. The sap from these seringa trees makes rubber. That is the Amazon River in the background.
