Panama '09

Last year I had technical difficulties with my Panama pictures. Not this year!!! I've got some great pictures and great stories.

I went to Panama with a church group from Atlanta. I didn't know any of them, but by the end of our journey I came away with some wonderful friends. We broke up into 4 teams of 3. My team worked in two different locations. The name of these places were: Nueva Esperanza (New Hope) and Nueva Vida (New Life). How amazing are those names?!?!

Here are some pictures of a service at Nueva Esperanza. This was a church that had children attending. The pastor and leadership of the church had been there for years inviting the parents to come and they just continued to send their children. They had no interest in coming and thought the church was only for the kids. This was our challenge in the area. Scroll down to see what God did:

After our 4 days at this site we had a discipleship group with eight adults in the community as well as several in hope discipleship visits!! Praise God!

One very special story involves the man in the wheelchair that you can see in the last picture. His name is Luis and he had no legs and about 6 fingers in total. A group of us went to his house one day and ended up staying there for close to an hour. While we were there he shared his life story with us about how he came to be in his wheelchair. He seemed to have had many stories about how God had spoken into his life, but also his issues with the church. At one point he had vowed never to go into a church again. Lately, he said he had been feeling like he should go back, but every time he wanted to the enemy would throw something in his way. I shared with him (as with about 80% of the people I spoke to in Panama) about the prodigal son and how just as the father was waiting, looking for his son, our Heavenly Father was waiting and looking for them, longing for the day He could see them coming home.

As you can see, Luis did come back to church. In fact, he spoke with me after the service that night. He said, "Do you remember when I told you that I would never go back to church? I think that there was a reason that you came to Panama and stopped at my house and spoke to me. Now I'm in church!" I told him, "That was completely God that brought me here and had us meet."

Please pray that Luis will continue to grow in Christ and that his family will also be a Godly light in their community.

Here's some shots of the fun I had with the kids that night:

On our last day in Nueva Esperanza a few of us were sitting with a little girl. I talked to her about the color bracelets that share the gospel. I shared it with her and said that when I give her the bracelet I wanted her to share the story with a friend. Then I gave her another bracelet. It just so happened that a friend of hers dropped by. Now was her chance to shine!!!! She shared the gospel bracelet with her friend and then had her friend say it back to her. Her friend got an extra bracelet to share. Even the children can be disciples!!!

Our second location was Nueva Vida. This area had very steep dirt roads. During the next few days we encountered a lot of apathetic people and were also met with some extreme weather conditions.

We were still able to share with many people. This was our church in Nueva Vida:

These were some of our team in Nueva Vida: