Patience & Flexibility

Yesterday we and the team from Mt. Carmel Baptist Church went to the morning worship service at Igreja Batista Nova Jerusalem in Santos, and then to the night service at Capela Calvary church in Sao Vicente. These are 2 of the 5 churches we are working with this week to share Jesus. At both of the churches they had some church members sit with the Americanos and translated the message for them, so they would not feel totally lost and so they could understand the message.

This was a good opportunity to meet some of the Brazilian pastors and brothers & sisters in Christ that the team will be working with in schools and other places to share Jesus. After the morning service at Igreja Batista Nova Jerusalem the church had a great lunch for all of us. After the night service at Capela Calvario (Calvary Chapel in English) we and many of the church members had some typical Brazilian food at the church. It was a very good day of worship and fellowship, and it was a good opportunity for the Americanos to see how Brazilians worship.

This morning we were scheduled to speak in our 1st public school, located in Santos. When we got to the school we learned that the government contacted all of the schools and had them cancel classes for today and have teachers meetings instead. So we had to scramble this morning to rearrange rides for the Americans, church people to help, and interpreters too, and we rescheduled everything for tomorrow. Because of the cancelling of classes today we will now have to split up our teams and speak in 2 schools tomorrow morning and afternoon. In the next 3 days (Tuesday through Thursday) we will need to speak in 4 schools in the 3 days. This is going to be very tiring and more difficult, as we will be speaking in over 100 classes in the next 3 days. But it will all be worth it to be able to share the Good News of Jesus with over 3000 people, and we are anxious to get started and to see what God is going to do.

Because we had extra time today, after lunch we walked around Santos and visited various stores and different places. We also used that time to pass out around 70 Gospel tracts to people, and we had various "divine appointments" in the streets. One young man we met named Kaio was very open to hearing about God's love for him and he gladly accepted the Gospel tract, and he was already reading it as we were walking away. Several people started to read their tract as soon as we gave it to them, and others said sincerely that they would read it with "carinho", meaning that it was special to them and they would read it with great care. We also met 2 ladies who are Christians, and one of them asked us to pray for her son Matheus, who is 18 and has not accepted Christ yet. She also told us what school he goes to and asked us to try to schedule our project there in the future. We ended up giving her a tract in English to give to her son as a present from the Americans, because he speaks English and he will probably have an interest in reading it knowing it is in English and came from some Americans.