Unusual Occurence

Something happened today when we were speaking in a school in Cubatao that is very unusual. The school is for students in 5th to 8th grade. Fortunately it has never happened before in the 100+ schools we have spoken at here in Brazil. It reminds us of the spiritual warfare for souls that we are engaging in, and that there is opposition in many places.

Nancy was speaking in other classrooms, and I and my team were in the school theater speaking to groups of 4 classes at one time. The first time we spoke today the speech went very well, all the way through sharing the Gospel. One of the teachers that was there listening was smiling during most of the speech, and it appeared that she enjoyed it very much. However, when we started talking about the prayer to receive Jesus she got very agitated.

As we continued to describe the prayer and what it means to invite Jesus into your heart and ask Him to be your Lord & Savior and commit your life to Him, she got more agitated and she started to talk to the other teachers there, and you could tell that she was trying to get them to try to stop us. As we started the prayer she left the room, I imagine to go get the principal to stop us from praying. We were close to the end of the prayer when she returned (alone) and she was still visibly upset. 2 sentences before we were done with the prayer she cut us off and she told her class to get up and walk out of the room. As they were leaving she loudly announced that she is a Christian (very debatable and doubtful), but that she strongly disagrees with us praying with and for the students.

Thankfully when she left the room for awhile we were able to lead many of the students in the prayer to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and she did not come back until the very end. Because her students were in the front rows, we could hear that most of them prayed out loud to accept Christ and commit their lives to Him before she interrupted.

Fortunately at this time in Brazil this is still a very rare occurence. We have had a very occasional complaint from a teacher because in their opinion they thought we were talking about religion (which we definitely do not do as it is against the rules in the schools in Brazil), but nothing too serious like today. We are mindful that this could change, and in fact we would expect as time goes on that some day in the future it will not be possible to share Jesus in the public school in Brazil. We are therefore urgently trying to share Jesus as much as we can in the schools while we can, because it is doubtful that this will last forever. Please pray for us as we strive to reach as many people as we possibly can for Jesus.