Trust in the Lord:
One of the most important things that a missionary must learn, to make it on the mission field, and to be able to adapt to culture, would be patience. This word would be synonymous with trusting in the Lord and His timing. In times like we are facing today, the key is the same, we must patiently trust in the Lord. The result of not trust in Him is anxiety and worry and even frustration or anger towards the Lord because things are not turning out like we thought. Trust in Him results in patience, calm and peace, knowing that His timing is always better than ours.
Preparations:
Well, the date of our departure for furlough has come and gone, so we are waiting for the government to reopen our borders and allow international flights. The date they have set so far is May 31, so we are waiting to see how things go for the next few weeks until we get word and can reprogram our flights. We are also waiting for stores to reopen so that we can get what we need to prepare our house to move out. This coming Monday the 11th we are supposed to go to a flexible quarantine where businesses can work part of the day and people can go out until the afternoon, but that is in question and might be postponed for another week or so. Although it is frustrating, I realize that we are learning that patience and trust that I mentioned at the beginning.
Preaching and Teaching:
We are also working to encourage the people from our church by continuing our services and preaching via internet and even having live services and meetings with our people through Zoom. We are planning and special service for next week where we will have a split service with the women and men meeting separately to try and encourage each group. On Wednesdays, for our Bible study, I have been doing a question and answer time where the people of the church send in their questions and we answer them with the Bible. We have had very good questions so far and it has helped to see where our people are at in their Bible knowledge. With our Bible college we have been able to do the same and are now in the last week of classes for this semester and hope to start the new semester in a couple of weeks. This will allow us to not get behind on our classes and especially for a couple of students that are close to graduating.
Intern Report:
Our intern Courtney that was here was already two and a half weeks past here Visa that allowed her to stay in the country for 6 months. The Bolivian airline scheduled a special flight to Miami to help with situations like hers and she was able to get a ticket. She made it back to the US on the 30th of April after 24 hours of traveling. We had a great time with Courtney during her internship and she was able to learn many valuable lessons while here. I know that the Lord is going to use her greatly as a missionary one day soon.
Prayer Requests:
1. Pray for the many people here in Bolivia that have been without income.
2. Pray for the many that are sick and dying from the Virus and are not saved.
3. Pray for our upcoming furlough and the preparations that we need to make.
4. Pray that all that is going on will give us new opportunities to share the gospel.