“You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.
I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.” Psalm 32:7-8
Theresa and I arrived safely back to Manitoba on the evening of the 22nd of March after having been gone for nearly five months. Upon our arrival at home we were somewhat shocked to find that there were still piles of snow drifted everywhere and temperatures that made us wonder if we shouldn’t have decided to stay in more southerly climes for a little while longer. To add insult to injury, today we are being slammed with a “Colorado low” and another huge dump of snow. The schools have been cancelled in our region due to the dangerous conditions of the roads, and it looks like Christmas, not spring. What happened to “April showers bring May flowers”?
Nonetheless, I think that at times both Theresa and I were beginning to mutter Johnny Cash’s Country hit under our breath:
“I’ve been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I’ve breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I’ve had my share, man
I’ve been everywhere”….
and we were both feeling that it was time to touch home plate again, at least for a little while.
However, having said that, our time away was extremely profitable and we saw the hand of God move in many ways. I want the share some of these with you without running the risk of being tedious by trying to cram too much of the five months into one single blog. Because of this I will attempt to pick out highlights only.
As some of you know, Theresa’s 90 year old mother fell about a year ago and broke her hip, making it necessary for her to move into a nursing home. Because she lives in Nebraska it makes everything difficult for the family since we all live a considerable distance from where she is. We were blessed that she could get into a wonderful care home last spring, and after a brief period of adjustment she found that she loved living there and is presently doing very well.
Nevertheless, this still means that on occasion Theresa and I need to spend time in Nebraska with her, as well as caring for the repairs and the cleanout of the family home in which she had lived for many years. Because of this we spent the first five weeks in Nebraska after leaving Manitoba on the 6th of November.
On the 10th of December we left Nebraska and headed east to Campobello Island, New Brunswick in order to celebrate Christmas and the New Year with our children and grandchildren who live on the island. We thoroughly enjoyed the milder weather (at least in comparison to Manitoba), the rugged and beautiful coastlines, the lighthouses, walking the beaches (despite cold winter winds), and the picturesque and unique beauty that is distinctively “east coast”. We enjoyed lobster and crab feeds and had pleasure in spending time with our grandchildren and seeing them growing up.
From Campobello we headed westward again taking the opportunity to pass through Elkhart, Indiana in order to spend a couple of nights and a delightful day with the extended Plett family; friends of ours originally from Manitoba.
We were blessed and refreshed by them and ready to again hit the road back to Nebraska “en route” to Mexico where we had established plans to spend the later part of January and the complete month of February reconnecting with pastors and other friends and the ongoing work in the Cd. Valles region, and especially being able to be introduced to the new work among the Pame tribal group in the mountainous region to the west of the city. We ended up spending six weeks in Mexico and were very blessed to be able to reconnect with many friends whom we had not seen for years, and left feeling that this had been perhaps one of the most fruitful mission trips that we had been involved with for many years.
We were also very blessed on two counts, both of which made the trip possible at all: first of all in finding friends in Pinawa who were willing to wonderfully look after our house here in Manitoba for the months that we were to be gone. Secondly, be able to rent a lovely little place in Mexico at a very reasonable rate so that we could have a home base in which to live while there and not become a burden to anyone. Despite generous and loving Mexican hospitality one does not want to be the “guest who never leaves”, especially considering the poverty of so many of our friends there. Indeed, having our own base became important as well because we hosted other guests for three weeks of our time in Mexico. None of which would have been possible if we had not found a suitable place to rent.
A considerable focus of our time in Mexico was to be centered on the new Pame outreach which pastor Javier and his mission teams have begun – a work to which many of us had never yet been personally introduced. To this end pastor Fred Erb from Listowel Community Church in Listowel, Ontario along with Oscar Salazar from Monterrey, Mexico (who was to translate for Fred), arrived to join Theresa and me in Cd. Valles on the 1st of February.
We spent the following days in the high mountains to the west where Javier introduced us to the different communities where churches had been newly planted among Pame believers. In each of these far-flung and isolated communities the believers were encouraged and also invited to a conference which was to be held on Saturday, the 4th.
On Saturday pastor Fred was the keynote speaker at the conference held for Pame leaders and Believers in the little community of Santa Catarina. There were about 150 people in attendance at the conference, arriving from many remote Pame communities across the whole of the region. Fred’s teaching was translated three ways – from English into Spanish, and then from Spanish into Xi-Ui (the language spoken by the Pame). It was a very blessed time with the Pame brothers and sisters and brought encouragement to many who often feel deeply cutoff and isolated from other Pame Believers due to the difficulty of travel and the fact that many of these Christians are very new in their faith and are surrounded by the deep witchcraft and animism of the predominant culture around them.
After the conference on Saturday afternoon we all piled back into the vehicles again and pounded our way back to Cd. Valles where pastor Fred was to present another conference in Javier’s church in Solidaridad on Sunday morning. Timing was a little bit precarious as well since we needed to leave the mountains early enough so that we could make it back to the city before late into the evening since it is not wise or safe to be on the roads at night in Mexico.
On Monday and Tuesday morning, after the conferences held on Saturday and Sunday, pastor Fred and Theresa and I spent time reconnecting with friends and leaders with whom we had worked for many years in Cd. Valles. Then on Tuesday afternoon Fred and Oscar left to return to Monterrey from where Fred would fly back to Canada on Wednesday.
For Theresa and me Wednesday meant turning the wheels of our little Mazda 3 eastward towards Tampico in order to pick up Clinton and Janet Miller who were arriving at the Tampico airport from Oregon. The Millers spent the following two weeks with us, again making us very thankful that we were able to rent a place sufficiently large enough for us all to stay.
Thus began the “second phase” of our time in Mexico.
The following two weeks and beyond were divided between intensely reconnecting with pastors, friends, and ministries more locally in the Cd. Valles area as well as being exposed even more deeply to the fledgling ministry among the Pame tribe in the mountainous region to the west.
As a result of the conference the previous week in Santa Catarina it was also a joy to be able to be introduced to other pastors and Christians completely outside of the usual circles within which we would have normally moved. This brought about spending time with Christian Pame leaders in the little village of La Parada who, along with a Wycliffe missionary are translating the Bible into Xi-Ui. To date this is still not a written language, and all translation must be done orally and recorded. There we were introduced to a little device called the “Proclaimer” which allows for people who rely on oral rather than written language to hear the Bible read to them in their “heart language”. The connection for these Pame translators is an organization called “Faith Comes By Hearing” (https://www.faithcomesbyhearing.com/blog/an-answer-to-prayer-the-proclaimer).
I’m very interested in finding out more about these little devices and seeing if we can also utilize this technology for Javier so that he can record doctrinal Bible teaching for the new leaders in the far-flung villages where churches are being planted (conceptually, a complete oral Bible School curriculum). If this could be done it would enable him to continue to train them in sound doctrine while freeing him up from the necessity to personally go to each of these difficult-to-reach villages every fortnight. I will keep you up to date as I find out more information on this.
We were also privileged to get to know pastor Jorge Luis Resendiz and his wife Rosalva who have planted a church in the city of Jalpan de Serra, again far outside our “normal” circle of involvement as it is a distance to the southwest of Cd Valles. We spent a delightful couple of days with this ministry couple, along with others from their little church in Jalpan. It is wonderful to have one’s perspective opened to the broader scope of what is happening in the Church, and to gain a bigger and more complete picture of what God is doing.
I often feel as if our time in the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains with the new Pame Believers was similar to reliving the Book of Acts over again. The ways in which God has opened villages to the gospel within this closed and tribal-orientated culture are often supernatural, and the individual stories of the awakening of spiritual eyes of faith are often miraculous. The love of the New Believers for the Lord is obvious and profound. Still, many of them lack a depth of sound biblical doctrine and on occasion fall back onto old animistic and cultural, pre-Christian belief paradigms.
Because of this, Javier, like the Apostle Paul before him is seeking to quickly find leaders in each of the newly-planted churches and into them instill the teaching of sound doctrine so that they can pass that instruction on to the local Body of Believers in each individual scattered village.
This approach is urgent because of several things: first of all, because of the distances and the brutality of the roads into many of the villages it is very difficult to access them. Javier and his team are attempting to reach at least some areas of this large Pame region every two weeks, but this is extremely physically taxing on them all. Besides this, the cost of doing so – even for gasoline alone – is an extreme burden on the ministry. Javier’s aging little Ford Ranger pickup that makes this outreach possible at all has definitely “seen better days” and is being held together on a wing and a prayer, and there is no money to replace it. Besides all of this, Javier is not a young man anymore and also has many responsibilities as a pastor and leader back in Solidaridad and Cd. Valles. The missionary, church-planting work among the Pame people requires that he is gone for days on end every two weeks, and even then it is impossible to cover all of the work that should be done – truthfully, in either place – among the Pame, or with his responsibilities at the home church.
Please remember to keep this work in your prayers. It is critical that Javier is able to quickly establish local, indigenous leaders in these communities for all of the reasons listed above, and no doubt for many more. Believers are coming to faith in the Lord, but many times there is inadequate depth of Bible-based doctrinal accuracy even in the local Christian leaders who must be relied upon in these fledgling churches.
As I mentioned earlier, although much of our attention on this ministry trip was focused towards the missionary outreach into the Pame region to the west of the city, that was not, and is certainly not the only thing happening in Mexico, nor is it all that Javier and Cristina are involved with.
One of the very encouraging components of the ongoing work is Cristina’s ministry with the poor children and their families in the squatter’s village of Buenos Aires just outside of the village of Solidaridad where Javier and Cristina’s home church is located. This Children’s Feeding Program called “Hidden Manna” has been feeding, helping, and loving the poor in this little squatter’s village for enough years that there are mature young people who are themselves now serving the Lord who began as little children in this program many years ago.
Because of this work with the children there is now also a thriving youth and adult church established in the center. Further, Cristina is reaching out to the poor, mainly unchurched women in the village and discipling them into the ways of God. Javier is also training a group of youth and adults in a mentorship Bible School using the facility as well.
Some of you will be somewhat familiar with the Hidden Manna Children’s Program because of Cristina’s monthly pictorial ministry reports if I have been forwarding them to you. If you are not receiving them and would like to have me send them to you, please email me and let me know where to send them.
An ongoing work that brought joy to Theresa’s heart in particular was to see the continuing ministry of the women’s sewing program which she began in our living room many years ago. This program has now gone full circle and during a graduation celebration that was held to honor the students, Cristina was recognized as the mother of the program, and Theresa as the grandmother. During the ceremony many of the women openly wept stating that except for Cristina and the focus of the sewing school in their lives during times of personal crisis they could not have made it through. Many also stated that it was because of Cristina’s loving and non-judgmental acceptance that they gave their lives and hearts to the Lord. It was also pretty amazing to see the dresses, skirts, blouses, pants, suits, etc., that these women and young girls are now producing!
Theresa and I are now home in Manitoba again – at least for the summer. We do have to return to Nebraska sometime this fall before the weather turns too cold so that I can finish some repairs on the house there before things freeze. Beyond that we plan to plug in locally over the summer and see where the Lord leads us.
It seems likely that if the doors remain open for us to do so we will plan on returning to Mexico again next winter for another visit. I believe that it is important for us to continue to be a link between the work there and the North American church.
Thank you for your love and prayers. Thank you for remembering the Church in Mexico. Please continue to hold Javier and Cristina and the others up in your prayers. Thank you for your giving and generosity towards those serving the Lord in Mexico. There are many monetary needs for the ongoing work, and it is often the lack of finances which hold up its advancement.
God has always been faithful over the many years, but like the widow in Elijah’s day, there is never more on hand than a little oil in a jug and a handful of flour at the bottom of a jar. But our commitment has been, and always will be that as long as God continues to provide the finances to do so, we will continue to make them available for the advancement of His work in Mexico.
Maranatha – Oh Lord, come!
Your fellow laborers as we await the Lord’s return,
Steven and Theresa
