After many miles of travel in various ways of transportation, it is good to be home. We left San Carlos Mexico June 19th and made it home to Clearwater, BC Thursday evening on June 23rd. Wednesday was a particularly long day departing from San Jose CA and arriving to Bellingham late that night. We put a 12 hour day in assuming we would find a hotel around Portland OR, but we couldn’t find one. They either looked like shady areas or else they were full. So, we just kept going and checking as we went. Finally, at Bellingham we found one hotel which only had one room left. It was 12:30AM and after 17 hours of highway we hit the hay and slept like rocks!
I continue to reflect over the blessings of my recent trip to Colombia. It had been some 15 years since I had been present with the P’s. Some of them I hadn’t seen in 25 years. We arrived to Cumaribo, unloaded our bags at the hotel, and then went out to the village where the conference was being held. The Sikuani pastors who were hosting the conference were humble and received us with much honor and love. They were eagerly anticipating our arrival and participation in the conference through teaching, but I felt like it was me who needed to learn humility from them.
As I mentioned in a previous email, we all met as a large group and held meetings in Spanish, but in the afternoon of that first day, I felt it would be good to meet separately with the P’s and hold the meeting in P. Many of the P’s don’t speak Spanish. The P’s arranged a place under a mango tree with benches, a small table and chair for me. They picked the spot under the tree saying it would be cooler. I sat down and we visited for a little while. I wasn’t sure what the Lord may have for us to discuss. Lorenzo opened the meeting with a prayer. Following that, I asked them what they wanted to talk about. They began to share their questions. The topics mentioned were pastoring, electronic Bibles, primers, a hymn book, Bible lessons, maps, radios, denominations, and organizations. So we talked about each of these topics until everyone seemed to be content and on the same page. Facilitating them with these materials is a challenge, but we are working on it. None of them are as important as having the Bibles. They expressed their great joy and thanks for having the Bibles.
I wanted to thank you for your prayers for that time together with them. I felt the presence of the Spirit of God in my own heart as He gave me wisdom and power to speak to them on each topic. I was particularly blessed to have a Bible in P in front of me on the table. I had never wanted to translate the NT. From those early days in 1991 when God changed my own heart and put a great zeal in me for the message of His grace, my deepest passion was to share that message. But in order to share that message with authority, one must have a Bible to do it. As I sat there feeling the presence of the Spirit in my heart, words of life flowed out from me in some of the best P I have ever spoken. As the Spirit directed our thoughts, I personally noticed how it was SO nice to be able to just open the P Bible to the place He was directing and to find the words of God written there in perfect P. That moment really struck me as it was the first time I was able to teach from the Bible we had done. Fernando took this little video of that moment.
We spent about 3 hours there that afternoon. The women had been cooking soup and they brought us food. Fernando and I enjoyed being served and the soup was SO good. They are amazing with herbs and seasonings. Here is the video of the pot of soup.
Russell has another location in Colombia which is much closer to the border of Venezuela and it’s a place where he said we could receive up to 200 P’s. We are praying about that and I’m open to the Lord’s leading. Russell said we would have the potential of building a recording studio right there which the P’s could also use. He talked about even the potential of a dedicated P radio transmitter. We have lots to ponder and look to the Lord about. I would appreciate your prayers on these potential projects. I would love to see the P’s themselves running a radio station some day.
All for now, more to come,
t.