Cristovál Highlights

We just had a debriefing meeting about Cristovál.

Hightlights include:

1. The growing sense of community. Everyone helping everyone else to win their team events, and especially during the two big races.
2. Their were more adults and families participating than ever before.
3. We have such good cooks in our midst.
4. We have more leaders to help than ever before.
5. Art and Aline did an excellent job coordinating the game events.

For me, a great highlight was how God healed Nailson’s foot. A week ago Nailson was at our door with a 26 oz. bottle of cachaça, that he was drinking straight out of the bottle. Our neighbour, two doors down, was stabbed and killed in the night, while trying to break up a fight. Her family wanted to go to the graveyard to bury her body, but no-one had a vehicle. Would we take them?

A week later I saw him hobbling down the road on crutches. I pulled over, and found that he was sober. He had punctured his foot with a nail. He was sober because the doctors gave him some strong medicine and told him he could not drink alcohol. I invited him to come spend the week-end with us for the Cristovál event.

The first night Chris Wiens preached. Then he invited people up for healing. Nailson hobbled up, leaning heavily on his cane to lessen the pain from his injured foot. Chris invited the children to come up and pray for him. Over about 5 minutes, the pain completely left his foot, and the swelling went down some. Nailson did not need the cane anymore. Over the next day and night the swelling went away completely, and Nailson was keen to enter into the races. “The only bad part about this week-end is that I didn’t get to enter the big mud race yesterday. If it was today, I would be running”.

I don’t have a “before” photo, but you can see all the wrinkles on his foot from how big the swelling was. He could barely fit into his flip flop sandal. It was about double in size.