THE MENNONITE MIRACLE

Well, here we are I'm the mountains.  We have been living in a hotel for six days.  The house we are supposed to rent is a new house, small, but we like it, but, no electricity and no kitchen.  The electricity  is supposed to be ready by tomorrow, then, maybe we can move in.  A sink is also supposed to be installed.    However, we are kind of having an ok time in the hotel.  We are friends with the maids and there is a fairly good restaurant downstairs.  The only slight problem is that being senior missionaries we pay for almost everything our selves, so, we have to move real soon!

Our responsibility is sort of gone up really a lot.   We never thought our mission would be like this.  We had dreams of showing people through a visiter center that gets one or two visitors a day.   Now, we have been cast into the mountains, it is freezing, we have no warm clothes, there are no normal markets, and, we have 50 missionaries we are responsible for!  We keep buying blankets for ourselves, but, we have been interviewing missionaries in there houses, and, some are so cold, we give our blankets away!  And, every church event we attend,  they ask us to talk!  We get another time to make fools of our selves with our really bad Spanish!

In our old place, where is was really warm, we made friends with this little family next door.  The little two year old girl really liked us.   We would give her little treats now and then.  So, we moved and some missionaries moved into our house.  We got a call from the mom of this little girl.  The girl ran to the mom and said.  "Gringos have moved into their house"   I guess we got beyond the gringo barrier.  

Gary got into big trouble again.   For some reason Kathy's hair is thinning a bit on top.  It may be because of the Guatemalan hair dye she used.  Anyway, Gary thought she would feel better if he called her "captain Picard" from star freak.   It did not go over well.   Especially when he would not move the car until she pointed her hand forward the front and said "engage".

Ok, so, we have missionaries even higher on the mountains in a little place called Rio Blanco.  These missionaries have been sort of ignored since the ride up is a dirt scary roads.  Of course, we are going to do our job right, so, we took off in our Toyota corolla to Rio Blanco. The road is terrible, big holes, washed out in many places, seemingly straight up or straight down.  We finally got there In about an hour.   We had a wonderful experience there.  Two branches, really run well, and what a wonderful spirit.  Of course, we had to give a short talk.  Well, on our way to the car, there was a little mentally challenged boy.  Kathy stopped and played with him for a while, then got into the car and started to cry!  We took of, and after about 20 minutes of driving, we realized we took the Wrong road. The road was terrifying.  We tried to turn around and got the car high centered. Cliffs up on one side and down on the other.  We were really scarred and said a fervent prayer.  Well, down the road came three cars, SUV's, full of Mennonite families.  They pulled us out and helped us out of there.  There are some important principles we learned.   We always say a prayer before we take off in the car, this time we did not because Kathy was so upset.  After we got back to the hotel, we realized that missionaries are always under attack by the adversary, and prayer is our main defense.  By our praying before we drive, we have experienced miracles, saving our lives.  We missed this time and almost lost it.  However, our prayer for help was immediately answered.  We were taught a big lesson.   

Please read 2 Nephi 32:8-9.

Some mountain pictures: