We have spent most of the month in Central America in a small town in Guatemala, called Panajachel. We worked with the craziest pastor in the world! We were challenged to trust God without using our minds, but rather stand on and in His Word. We literally saw sick people healed and demon possessed people delivered. After two weeks of intense teachings, working and praying, we were sent out on a Luke10 journey. I suggest you read that piece of scripture before reading our story…
Natasha, Sumien and I, travelled through three different countries and were left on the Honduras border at seven the evening without food, money or a place to stay. Natasha had gotten the name Carlos in a dream and we believed it to be a town in Nicaragua - a thousand kilometres in the wrong direction of where we were to be in six day’s time. We hitched a ride from a truck driver and slept under his truck at the Nicaragua border. The next day we struggled for 7 hours to get into Nicaragua and eventually dusted our feet, like Luke 10 teaches, and moved back to Honduras. At the border they also wouldn’t let us in, because we didn’t have any money. While trying to persuade them to help us there came a guy called Carlos to speak to us, this of course being the name we had heard from the Lord! He eventually left and right after that the border patrol let us go through for free. As we were walking, Carlos came along and picked us up. God’s timing is perfect, and we had the opportunity to share the gospel with him and he blessed us with Pizza Hut and cool drinks.
That night he dropped us of at the same border we were at the previous night, and as we were walking and praying we saw a church and started speaking to pastor Michael. He gave us so much food and stuff to drink we felt we were going to burst! We then joined them for a church service and God had so planned it that his sermon came out of Luke 10! We then spent the following two days with Pastor Michael, his family and their congregation just worshipping God and ministering to them. There were tears of sadness when we had to leave.
Giving ourselves two and a half days to travel through mountainous terrain through 3 countries and over 1000 km we were up for a challenge. The first day we got on five consecutive expensive busses in El Salvador without once having to pay a cent. We travelled at least 600km in 10hours. The first two bus drivers stopped and picked us up alongside the road for no apparent reason. With the third bus a lady in the bus decided to pay for us. She being a Mormon, I got a four hour chance of sharing the Gospel with her and really saw God working in her heart. The next bus all of the bus conducters used their personal money to buy us three tickets. And we got two more rides to the Guatemala border. There we met an awesome man called Vinicio, who gave us a place to sleep on the border post, him being one of the officials. It was really interesting to walk around behind the official area and make ourselves coffee have cake and play computer games on the official’s computers! He took us to have a Christmas dinner in a restaurant as well.
The following morning he gave us breakfast and coffee and then organized a ride for us to the main city of Guatemala, were we got another bus for free. This bus broke right after we got on and then we were left to hitchhike on Christmas day. A pickup with a whole family came past and picked us up. They said that they were driving around, on Christmas day, for fun and would take us to Panajachel, which is four hours of driving away!
So we got back a day early without having a penny, or any plans, preaching about Jesus in four different countries. We were never hungry, or without place to sleep and there are two more teams who can testify with us that our God is truly alive, powerful and wonderful!
Prayer requests.
⅟ For unity and God given brokenness in our team.
⅟ For deeper spiritual truth’s and wisdom for all of us.
n⅟ That God will keep on working in all of our hearts for us to be able to live out our purpose.
⅟ That God will keep on working in the
people we have reached thus far as well as working in the people we are yet to meet.
Nicholas