This Week's Musings

Colombian missionaries, Phil and Deene, spent the week here encouraging us all. They are an insightful and anointed couple (while I don't use that word often, but it sums up their lives well). On Saturday they led a communal prayer meeting – praying in community. Normally when a group prays together, each individual prayer stands alone. In communal prayer we are building our prayers one upon another, praying in continuity with what the previous person prayed, expanding a prayer on the same subject. In a communal prayer we listen and follow the conversation with God. We keep the prayers brief allowing others to always be joining in. It was a truly amazing prayer time as a group of 20 people opened their lives in confession, vulnerability and weeping. We had a taste of God working, and it left us longing for more.

We said good-bye to our friends and partners in ministry on Saturday. Keith and Dawn have probably just crossed the border on their way to Pennsylvania. We will miss their love and support for us, as well as the weekly fellowship at Italian Coffee Company. We actually began our friendship in Portland and continued it with many good memories here in Mexico. Keith and I met weekly for over a year for morning prayer, but we also had campfires, made late night runs to the bus station, and played the ancient Mayan number game together. Blessings, Goodlings!

Diana and I were hitched twenty-one years ago on June, 4th. She was a beautiful June bride whose beauty has only grown through the years. While her new hair style is attractive and suits her well, it is really the inner beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit that radiates from her. As for me, I am blessed to have married the wife of my youth. As a friend friend from West Virgina often reminds me, “Son, you married way over your head.”

In preparation for the baptism of eleven people this Sunday, pastor Steve told the story of Bob. Bob decided to take some of the poorest of the poor from his ministry in Venezuela to Israel. While there some of the group decided they wanted to be baptized in the Jordan. Since Bob was not of an immersion tradition, he put them off for a while so that he could watch how other groups did it. Finally confident enough that he knew what to do he entered the water with the first person. As he walked in to his surprise the others on the bank began yelling, “Good-bye, goodbye, goodbye”. Then as the person came up out of the water they yelled, “Hello, hello, welcome back.” What a great picture of dying to the old life, being buried, and rising again to new life.