Every time I see this certain grass I look around to see if someone was painting something nearby. Each blade looks like splattered it while cleaning a white paint brush. 

This second picture is another wild flower that reminds me of a smaller version of Canadian Thistle, except without the thistles.

We look forward to the day when we have a reception room and a multi-purpose, large office at the front of our church. We want people people to feel welcome to come and hang out, get good drinking water, and to sign up for helpful courses that will help them improve their lives.

We are working to become a community center, a safe and fun place to come, a place where people can find peace, and where people can sense God’s love and care.

Easter morning we have a Sunrise Service at church, which usually starts a few hours after the sun actually rises in Marabá. It’s a new tradition for our community of believers, and one they look forward to. Later, during the main service, the kids did a skit, Monica preached, and almost the whole church came forward for prayer at the end. Our church seems to have turned a corner, some time back, and now there are often new people present who we never invited, and who we don’t know. I love it when people feel safe enough at church to bring their friends.

Paulo here, in the first picture, is drunk most of the time. He also knows Christian hymns, and quite a few Bible stories. He got “disciplined” one time, from some church somewhere, and never got back on the right track again. These drunks often have a strong aura radiating off of them. I think it has to do with the residue of the drugs and alcohol coming out through their skin. It leaks out into the air around them. I don’t think they realize it. It takes a decision to sit beside them. I am think we also leak out whatever is in us. If we are getting filled up with God every morning, we are leaking out the Kingdom of God wherever we are. This is feels good to some people around us, and not so good to others. And if we have bitterness of envy in our hearts, that leaks out too, which really feels wrong to people around us, kind of like how salty water and fresh water cannot flow out of the same source. So we have to be careful. Fill up with the good stuff every morning. Confess and lose the bad stuff, whenever it surfaces in our thoughts. And hang out with people so we can influence them for good, just by quietly sitting beside them.

Marabá has a zoo which has some animals in pens, and others that are not. We had a bit of trouble eating our lunch as these coati’s kept crashing our party. We would grab them by the tail, take them about 100 yards away, and let them go. But in the end, they had the home ground advantage. We packed up our lunch. It was a lot of fun.

Monday was a “free day” for the team. They chose to go to hang out for the morning, then go to the zoo, then have a pizza party with all who live on the chacará, plus Eliete’s family, many of whom went to Pacajá with them.

The Kid’s Encontro started with a church service, ministry, and games on Friday night. Then everyone went home. We resumed the next morning at 8:00 a.m., and except for a few hour break in the late afternoon, it went until 9:00 p.m. Then again Sunday morning. It was busy, with about 85 kids, and about 35 helpers. Deanna organized it all, the High Road Academy team pitched in where they could, and local leaders and missionaries helped out wherever they could. Children are amazingly energetic!

The Youth Team from High Road Academy / City Life Church helped Deanna and the team here host a Kid’s Camp this week-end.

Eliel bought new hats for the band.

Daisy made some very cool children’s games while she was at our house a few weeks ago. We had stations, late Friday, with different games at each station.

The presence of God was visible on some of the kids during the ministry time after the Friday night worship service.

They all went home for the night, and were back for a hot-chocolate-bread-and-butter breakfast at 8:00 a.m. Saturday morning.

We moved to Brazil because Luke Huber, the founder of PAZ Mission, invited us. This was back in about 1993 or so. We lived with other PAZ missionaries in Santarem for our first two years here, learning the language and starting to learn about Brazilian culture. Scott and Aldine were our neighbours then. They had been missionaries about two years at that time, and have children about the same age as ours. What a pleasure to spend an evening together here in Marabá. Scott is travelling with his friend Matt, another missionary, to Southern Brazil, to deliver a car.

Our friends at PAZ mission, including the Huber and Hrubik families, continue to be among the best examples we know of missionary families, whose children are also becoming great missionaries and Christian leaders. Their council to us in our first years in Brazil continues to bless us, and we do what we can to pass this family blessing on to the missionaries who have joined us in the Xingu Mission. http://www.projectamazon.org/

As I was thinking with Scott, back then Jim and Julie Brown had only been here 5 months. Bud and Suzanne came a year later. All these people are still missionaries, almost 20 years later, spread out across the Amazon.

http://www.projectamazon.org/missionaries/scott-and-aldine-blunier/