The Deluge outside our front door in Cd. Valles upon my return
Do you remember the song from your childhood? Well, we are living it here in Mexico I am afraid. If you click onto the following link you will catch a bird’s eye idea of what we are facing. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-24098184. Even 100 miles in from the coast, and more from the actual site of the hurricane’s landfall, we are being deluged with rain here in Cd. Valles. Curiously, what began as a very dangerously dry rainy season again this year, is ending with devastating rains and flooding.
As soon as I can, I need to make my way out the muddy trail to the farm and see what is left of our freshly planted sugarcane. I am afraid that there may be little left of the newly tilled and carefully worked soil that we laboured so hard over only weeks ago. It gives “zero till” farming a whole new meaning (right James!).
But, let me back up a little bit since the last time that I posted was from Laredo, Texas where I was spending a rather unhappy several days waiting to get some farm equipment across the border into Mexico.
As I eluded to in my last blog as well, I am now completely convinced that the ten plus months of aggravation in waiting for permits and paperwork to get two implements into the country – both valued at only $400 dollars combined – was solely for the purpose of linking with Pastor Jonathan Aragon and Rafael Dueñas, and United Baptist Church in Laredo. Over the remainder of my time in Laredo I began to develop a close relationship with Pastor Jonathan, who has newly arrived in the city to take over the pastorate of UBC. Plans stand at present for an exploratory team from there to come down sometime before the end of the year to see if this is a God-link, and if they wish to pursue working together in some way. Praise the Lord for surprises and unexpected blessings.
As of Saturday there was still no permits or paperwork, nor were we any closer to getting any. However, it was a holiday weekend – September 16th marks Mexican Independence Day. It also was a weekend that promised heavy, torrential rainfall due to the hurricane and tropical storm hitting both coasts. I knew that many people were praying. And, besides, I was somewhat desperate and out of options. We had already kicked the same cat for over ten months to no avail.
I did what any reasonable person would do. I put the load low and unobtrusive in the van, covered it, prayed hard, and came south. Thank God for green lights at the checkpoints rather than red, for heavy rain, for lots of prayer, and for blinded eyes. Ask no questions please, and we will leave it at that.
I arrived in Cd. Valles after a very quiet trip down from the border. Besides very heavy rains along the way there were no other incidents. I was very happy to be home, and Theresa to have me back. That evening (Sunday), the little trickle of a stream below our house flooded over its banks, covering the bridge and causing a Niagara-like cascade as the water poured over the edges of the bridge into the rushing torrent below. The road past our house flooded over causing all traffic there to stop for several hours. Good timing indeed to be here rather than on the road.
As soon as things dry out enough I hope to get out to the farm and reassemble the disc (hoping that I remember where all of the pieces go), and get some weeds taken care of. Thank you Lord. We have been waiting a long time for this.
I have also been reading a book called “Jungle Pilot, The Life and Witness of Nate Saint”. Nate Saint, as I am sure you will remember, was one of the missionaries, who, along with Jim Elliot and three others, were killed in Ecuador by the Auca Indians in January, 1956. I am really enjoying the book and finding this biography of his life a challenge. I also am enjoying it on a personal level. It is interesting how very similar the early work in Ecuador was with that of Northern Ontario were I cut my teeth – that is, if one replaces heat and jungle for cold and boreal forests. But, the similarities are striking, and the use of the airplane as the workhorse of the missionary is so very similar in both. I had many memories of the mission pilots and little mission airplanes from my own childhood as I read the book. Also, the missionaries of the southern jungle were obviously of the same ilk as those with whom I grew up in the far reaches of the north of Canada.
I was struck with one passage in particular, and I would like to include a portion of a talk that Nate Saint gave on HCJB radio in Quito, Ecuador in early 1949. Despite the historical context that references the then-fresh Second World War, and the rather bulky quotes from the King James Version of the Bible, I believe that it challenges the very core of our walk with God.
The subject of his talk was “expendability”.
The fact that is mixed in a very important way with our walk is the thing that became commonly known during the last war as “expendability”…
During the last war we were taught that, in order to obtain our objective, we had to be willing to be expendable, and many lives were spent paying the price of our redemption from the bonds of political slavery.
This very afternoon thousands of soldiers are known by their serial numbers as men who are expendable. During the last war we saw big bombers on the assembly line, row after row, powerful, costly implements of war! Yet we all knew – we actually knew that many of those bombers would not accomplish even five missions over enemy territory. We also knew that young fellows, many of them volunteers, would ride in those airborne machine-gun turrets, and their live expectancy behind those guns was, with the trigger down, only four minutes. Tremendous expendability!
We know that there is only one answer when our country demands that we share in the price of freedom – yet when the Lord Jesus asks us to pay the price for world evangelization, we often answer without a word. We cannot go. We say it costs too much.
God Himself laid down the law when He built the universe. He knew when He made it what the price was going to be. And the Lamb of God was slain in the counsels of God from before the foundation of the world. If God didn’t hold back His only Son, but gave Him up to pay the price for our failure and sin, then how can we Christians hold back our lives – the lives He really owns?
The Lord tells us that He that loveth his life – we might say that he that is selfish with his life – shall lose it. It’s inescapable.
Missionaries constantly face expendability. And people who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives. They forget that when their lives are spent and the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted.
Some might say, isn’t it too great a price to pay? When missionaries consider themselves – their lives before God – they consider themselves expendable. And in our personal lives as Christians isn’t the same thing true? Isn’t the price small in the light of God’s infinite love? Those who know the joy of leading a stranger to Christ and those who have gone to tribes who have never heard the gospel, gladly count themselves expendable. And they count it all joy.
“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone”. The apostle Paul said, “I die daily. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”
And Jesus said, “There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time… and in the world to come eternal life”.
These are truly significant words. Are we willing to be expendable for God? And yet, as Nate Saint correctly pointed out, we are all expending our lives. In one way or another our lives are being spent. The only question is “how”, and for “whom”.
I must close and get onto other things. There is still much to get done today while the rain keeps falling.
Blessings my friends,
Steven and Theresa
