Meditations and teachings from the Bible and life
My mother played a huge role in bringing me to Christ. When she passed from this life April 9th of 2015, I conducted her funeral, and several people told me I should write up an account of her life. This little booklet is that account. Version 1 (below) is in a format for printing, so if you want to print it, simply download it.
To read the booklet online, please click on version 2, immediately below.
“Isn’t there anybody else up there who could lead us? What am I doing following a Mexican through the Peruvian Amazon?!” It was nearly midnight, moonless and black, in the dense, tropical jungle of Peru. Just ahead of me, I could only faintly discern the bulky form of my friend Ernie Neria, a Mexican/American pastor from Vineyard Christian Fellowship of El Paso, Texas. With his flashlight, Ernie was leading the way, trying to find the trail back to the riverboat we’d left tied up along the Marañon River, a winding tributary of the Amazon. But the flashlight’s batteries were going dead, and its feeble beam was now so weak that we could barely see three feet in front of us. With such a weak light, everything looked the same, making it almost impossible to distinguish between the scarcely used trail and the rest of the jungle. We had been stumbling along now for more than 45 minutes, tripping over the exposed roots of trees, sloshing through water and mud, slipping, falling, at times even crawling, in a desperate attempt to find our way. Our clothes were now soaked with sweat, our shoes, socks, and blue jeans up to the knees were wet and caked with slippery mud. Swarms of mosquitoes buzzed around us, many biting us right through our clothes. Were we ever going to get out of here, or would we end up as food for the myriads of jungle animals we heard around us, including the mosquitoes?
An Angel Named Olga
Today I went to KSCE TV to do my weekly program. When you enter the station, they have you sign in and put the date on a clipboard. Mexican pastors had entered before me, so they put the date as they write it, 2-6-16, instead of the way we write it, 6-2-16. I was a bit confused for a moment, and asked the receptionist about it, then we both simultaneously realized what was going on.
Most countries of the world record the date in a more logical way than we Americans do, writing day, month, and year, instead of month, day, and year. As the receptionist began to explain, I remembered that other countries write dates that way. “You know what?,” I said. “This difference in how we write dates once got me into legal trouble in Russia. It cost me some $1200 dollars, and a seven-day delay. It kept me from making it to a teaching engagement I had in Kazakhstan too. I’ll never forget it!” Continue reading “An Angel Named Olga”
This is the true story of a modern-day Francis of Assisi who worked in Mexico until he was shot by a crazed marijuana grower in the mountains of Northern Mexico. I researched and wrote this after meeting several people who’d been touched by this man’s life. Click the link below to download the PDF.