Bolivia #8 – A Holiday, and What Happened
Today was the 199th anniversary of the independence of the city of La Paz, and fireworks were a major part of the festivities last night, and they have continued through the day. The day began as usual, with our early morning Bible study, only I switched with Ed, who is now doing the rest of the home studies. I needed the projector for my series on the seven churches of Asia, and he was happy to swap with me. In fact, he did the study last night at the Irustas. The study is going very well, and people are really getting into digging deep into these incredible letters in Revelation 2 & 3.
With school out today, we had 28 kids in VBS, which was great! I dropped in during crafts time and the kids all crowded around to show me their decorated foam crosses and give me hugs. They are precious children. There’s one 5 or 6 year old ittle girl in particular, Beatrice, whom I’d adopt if I could and her parents would let her go! She comes by herself every day, usually with her friend Carol, and always runs to greet me and jump into my arms. Yeah, she’s got me wrapped around her little finger, I admit it.
Well, even though it was a holiday, all the music students showed up in the afternoon, and the classes lasted a long time, longer than the scheduled time even. The English classes were officially cancelled, but we still had five girls come anyway, and we met in another room. Tomorrow they’ll all be back, and we’ll work our usual program, but today we were kind of low-key. I taught them a gospel song by going through the lyrics line by line, explaining the English meaning, and then using it as a testimony of why I have confidence in Christ. Ed helped me out, and the gospel just flowed out.The response was pretty incredible. One girl in particular said that though she had heard things like God loves you, and you can trust Him, before, she had never heard it like this – never heard about Christ as the foundation of our faith and confidence for this life and the next. She wants to come back to one of our concerts, and I hope that we can see her come to a saving knowledge of Christ. She and another girl in particular are really open and eager to hear. It was an awesome time.
We had a regular service here at the church in the evening, and just kept on with the Revelation series. We sang some Aymaran special music, and Rachel played her flute and sang, too, with Liz accompanying on the piano. It was a very good day. The wind picked up and the temp dropped sharply tonight, and it was pretty cold. Everyone is dreading taking a shower, as the sporadically hot water falls over you, getting you nice and wet so that the icy wind can chill you off as you shower and then race back to the relative warmth of your room! Everyone has been trying to get showers in during the middle of the day to take advantage of the warmer air (it gets up into the 50s during the day). Anyway, looking forward to seeing what the Lord has for us tomorrow. We’ve got a big concert in the evening, and we need more practice! Pray hard! Thanks.
