A few weeks ago I was with a team from James River Assembly, from Springfield, MO. This was a great team and there were quite a few "firsts" on this trip.
We partnered with a local church to go to a Zapoteco village called Tierra Blanca. It was my first opportunity to minister in a Zapoteco village. It is about 8 hours from our mission base. We were scheduled to do a children's outreach to celebrate the Mexican national holiday, "Dia de los Niños" or "Children's Day." There were approximately 400 children that were in attendance which did not include parents. So there were probably a good 500-600 people in attedance. Almost all of the children responded during the altar call.
During the event there was a torrential downpour. So we had to delay the event to re-setup the area to be sheltered from the rain. The Mexican team prayed for the rain to stop, while the U.S. team-members re-setup up chairs and speakers in another area. But it started raining harder and thundered and there were lightning flashes. So the Mexican team-members restarted the program under the shelter while the U.S. team-members began praying for the rain to stop. (This group comes from a church that has a huge Independence Day event every year and begins interceding for the weather to be nice for the concert and firework display a month prior to the event. For the past 10 years or more, July 4th has had good weather even when the surrounding communities have rain or storms. So their faith to pray for weather is something that they are known for in the community) Within less than five minutes the rain stopped and the sun came out from behind the clouds and began drying up the rain. The Mexicans were so blessed and impacted by this answered prayer.
Earlier in the day, the U.S. team-members had prayed for a young girl that had a low grade-fever and was throwing up, and she stopped throwing up but still was not feeling well. So during one of the times that the U.S. team-members were helping in a distribution, several of the Mexican team-members began to pray for the same girl. After a few moments the girl vomitted and writhing in the still warm vomit was the culprit, a 5-6 inch round worm the width of a cooked spaghetti noodle. One of the young team members stepped on it, in a show of taking dominion over the enemy. But comically enough the now dominated worm was hopelessly stuck in the treads of his shoe. It was hilarious watching as he was praying fervently for the continued healing of the little girl while wagging his foot around trying to unlodge the squished worm.
So both teams were impacted by the faith of the other and there was a spiritual cross pollination of faith. Seeing the faith for stopping the rain and the healing of the little girl when she vomitted out the worm really caused both teams faith to be built up to believe God for more and to realize that he was an answerer of prayers.
We then had a brief church service in which several new people came for the first time to church because of the outreach (the church has a regular membership of about 15-18) I had the opportunity to share my testimony about my trip to Korea (if you don't know about my trip read my previoius blogs from January and February). And I used it as an illustration of how the Devil lies to us to tell us our Heavenly father does not want us when indeed he is waiting for us to return home and receive all of his love. There were 8 people that responded to the altar call and got saved and came home to their heavenly father as I came home to my earthly one.
Just like in Xalitla, it was amazing to be probably some of the first missionaries to offer up prayers and worship to our loving God, I realized that the same thing was happening for the first time in the history of Tierra Blanca. We were quite possibly the first foreigners or missionaries to arrive to this small village and for the first time worship and prayer was going up to God in English from this hunble church. What an awesome privilege!!!
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