Colombian Christian Mission

Yesterday I saw Paul Odham off at the airport. Paul is a specialist in learning difficulties and he has been very generously donating much of his vacation to coming to Colombia to help us train our own teachers and to provide much needed help to the public school system as well. His conferences have snowballed in popularity to the point where we had over 1,000 people in the different training sessions this year. Our very first one started with only the fifteen teachers at our Christian Day School.

Paul Odham, our specialist in learning difficulties, arrived in Colombia last Saturday night late. Almost immediately we put him to work. The very next morning we had him teaching our college students at the church here in Normandía. Immediately after church we loaded up the car and headed down over the Andes Mountains to Villavicencio. The road was heavily militarized and we even passed tanks as well as the heavily armed soldiers. But we arrived without difficulty in the late afternoon. We headed up to our old house there as Martin Sanders had invited us to stay with him.

God has blessed me with a physical stamina where I rarely get sick. Some pretty severe bouts of dysentery in the early years and then my treatment for Basal cell carcinoma about ten years ago now were the only things of significance. Add in a couple of cases of dengue fever and then a few colds and sore throats and that about wraps it up.

Sundays are always busy days. That is to be expected for any preacher. But that is multiplied for a missionary, because a missionary does not simply preach at one church. All of the churches like to have the missionary come for a visit and then preach. Most Sundays I will preach at two different churches. This past was a typical Sunday for me. The day began when I was up early and working to put the final touches on my sermon. We left the apartment around nine in the morning. It would be more than twelve hours before we would return.

This past week I traveled to Villavicencio to work with the students at the Christian school we operate there. Gordon Clifford, who prints many of the teaching materials that we use, arrived for a two week visit. He wanted to see the missionary work that uses between thirty and sixty percent of all of the materials that he prints, depending on the genre. So after spending the weekend here in Bogotá, where I was scheduled to preach at the Normandia church, we headed down over the mountains to Villavicencio. Immediately upon arriving I began working.

Yesterday, sandwiched between the three weeks of intensive activity with the deaf ministry and a two week visit by Gordon Clifford, the person who publishes much of what I write in Spanish translate for teaching here in the church, I taught a modular class at the Bible College. There were students who really wanted to get their required class in philosophy completed and so were asking if I could possibly fit it into my schedule. I agreed to do it in an intensive modular format.

We are wrapping up two weeks of intensive work with the deaf church here in Bogotá. Even with the purchase of ten new chairs, there have never been enough as attendance has swelled so some forty people nearly every Sunday. We borrow chairs from the hearing church, when they are available. But only so many will fit in the room we outfitted as a sanctuary for the deaf church. So a good number wind up standing for the service as there is no place to sit. But it would cost us around $1,000 to knock downa wall and buy more chairs.

This past week has been a time of intensive teaching and working with the deaf preacher. We are planning on ordaining him this coming Sunday and we want to make sure that he is well prepared for the new responsibilities he will be taking on. The deaf church has been excited about the prospect of having their preacher ordained and is looking forward to this Sunday. In our teaching efforts we have held two hour classes with the deaf preacher four days last week and this week as well.

Yesterday Dewayne Liebrandt and I attended the deaf church service here in Bogotá. There were 30 deaf believers present and four hearing family members as well. The deaf work here in Colombia has made spectacular progress in the very short time since we established the church. The deaf preacher has made great strides in his preaching and in his use of the technology available to him as an aid in the dissemination of the Gospel. From his first halting efforts as preaching, he has progressed well and now his sermons are well organized and presented with great effectiveness.

Praise the Lord! I got my car back today. In has been in the shop for nearly two weeks. There was nothing major wrong with it, just a lot of little things. But it is becoming very hard to get parts for it now because of its age. The car I drive down here is now seventeen years old. That is almost old enough for historical plates in the states. But down here, while a seventeen year old car is not common, it is not all that unusual either.