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| . . . in his spirit, he just felt like the Spirit of God rose up in him and said, ‘Go up further.’ So he kept going, and going, and going. |
LATIN AMERICA — “You know, we have countries in Latin America that have really difficult issues, due to guerrilla activity and to drug problems. So the Faith Comes By Hearing distribution is being done by courageous workers who go to villages in areas where I just don’t know if I could send my son. Yet they go – they believe God wants his Word heard in these villages.
“One of these faithful workers was going up a river. In some of these places the river is the only channel of transportation, so you don’t give the FCBH worker a bicycle or a horse, you give him a launch or a dugout canoe with a motor on it.
“So he was going upriver distributing New Testaments on cassette to the different villages, talking to the churches. He had one cassette left, but he had entered into what was considered a drug-controlled area. It was very, very dangerous and he was becoming extremely uneasy and wanted to turn around. But he said that, in his spirit, he just felt like the Spirit of God rose up in him and said, ‘Go up further.’ So he kept going, and going, and going.
“Finally he came to a little village. He pulled the canoe up, got out, and of course the people had seen him coming, because not many strangers came to that area. A woman came down to meet him and said, ‘What are you here for?’ He said, ‘The Lord has sent me here,’ and he brought out the Bible in Spanish on cassette. He said, ‘The Lord told me to come here and bring you this New Testament on cassette.’ He barely got the words out before she screamed and ran through the village. He was left in the middle of the village with people coming out of their huts to see what was going on. He was both afraid and not sure what to do, so he just stood there, waiting.
“Pretty soon the woman came back, very excited, with a blind man whom she was dragging by the hand. She was talking and talking and dragging him along with her.
“Well, it turned out that the blind man was the pastor. What had happened was that, some months before, the pastor and this woman and the leaders of the church had joined together, because most of the people were illiterate and the pastor was blind, and they had begun to pray.
“They had said, ‘Lord, please send us your Word on cassette, we have heard that there is a Bible on cassette, would you send it to us.’ And so they had been just praying, believing, but when this man entered the village with the Bible on cassette she was so excited that she screamed and ran off to tell the pastor, ‘God has answered our prayers, the Bible has come!’
“So then the distributor saw why the Holy Spirit had been moving in his heart, saying, ‘Go up further, go up further.’
“We ask that you would pray for our workers around the world who sacrificially take God’s Word to these distant areas, often sleeping alongside the trails, eating food that they’re unsure about, and yet working faithfully day after day to bring God’s Word to the people.” (WR 386/12 - 6/7.04)