It is More Blessed to Give than to Receive
It truly is a great joy of mine and for my wife to be able to see the Lord bless others through our family and Fervent Fire Ministries. Your giving allows us to do such things as provide food provisions for some of the more needy families in the fellowship we are a part of here in Managua. Jessica and I always try to remain sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s leading and when we feel Him (although it’s not always necessary to feel the nudge of the Spirit, we can just decide to be obedient to the scriptures as well) asking us to bless others at a specific moment in some way, we try to obey right then without question. The other day just that happened!
We went around and visited several of the families in our fellowship who we felt the Spirit tell us to go to and we brought them some food provisions and the awesome thing is that we could do it as a family. It took us about 3 hours or so to go by the provisions and deliver them to each family and with 3 kids in the car, one being a 2 month old, that can be quite the challenge! But it was so worth it to know that our brothers and sisters in the faith are being taken care of and have their basic needs met. We really do consider as family those who are walking with us on the narrow road to salvation as obedient sons and daughters of God. What’s ours is theirs and we are thankful that the Lord has entrusted us with people who believe in us and what we are doing here in Nicaragua enough to provide funds and financial backing so that we can meet these needs as is necessary.
“Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”
Another opportunity that I have had the pleasure of accepting since about August or so is to get to know these guys on the right better as I have become increasingly more involved in the production side of the sweet corn business I have been a part since about April of this year. An interesting challenge that I have embraced has been that all the staff on the production side of the business are not born again; while the staff on the processing and sales side of the business are all born again. I have been working to build a bridge of communication and understanding between the two sides of the operation.
I was finally able to share the Gospel with these gentlemen about a week or so ago after wanting to for some time, but it just seemed like something kept coming up that prevented me from doing it. I was also able to have a good follow up conversation with one of them about what they thought about what I shared and once again I was reminded about how crafty the evil one is and how he loves to use religion (in Nicaragua most often Catholicism) mixed with some truth to get people to think they’re ok with God when they actually have never responded to the Gospel in the biblical way. I will continue to share with the guys and believe that soon one of them will be the 1st do say YES to Jesus and get born again! Thank you for praying for them with me!
These guys work hard and even though they aren’t on the same page spiritually with the rest of the FrutiVera team yet, we want to make sure they are taken care of and feel appreciated. Thank you for helping us bless the whole staff of FrutiVera with food provisions to end the year to say thank you for all their hard work! It’s not much, but it’s something and you helped us do it through your giving! We truly feel that God is behind our efforts in the sweet corn business that and in fact He is the reason we even began getting involved to begin with! Each step of the way we are facing new challenges and are forced to depend on His guidance time and again to navigate this new territory we are in so that He gets all the glory and because He is so worthy of it all!
“You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You.”
One other way we can give to others is with our time! I felt lead by the Lord (and also because I just wanted to) to begin spending some time with a few brothers in the Lord in the early morning a few days a week reading the scriptures and praying together. Two of them live close by so they can get here pretty easily at 6am and we spend one hour together in simple scripture reading and prayer. It has been a blessing for me to spend some quality time with my brothers, hearing more from God’s heart together through His word and opening our hearts together to Him in prayer. We also were blessed to be able to load up 13 of us guys in the church here in Nicaragua and spend about 24 hours together out a brother’s ranch in focused time together in the Lord.
We got to talk about some things that the Lord has been putting on our hearts over the past few months and really press into the presence of the Lord together. Since our time together was only for 24 hours we really made the most of it through prayer, discussion, worship and time spent individually as each looked for an open space in which to seek the Lord in personal communion for a few hours. I was excited to hear that there was already fruit from that time together as one brother went right home to his family and asked his wife for forgiveness in front of his kids for not loving her as the Lord had instructed and designed him too. Wow! That is so amazing! Thank you for praying with us and for us for the men in the fellowship to step up as men of God and lead their families through their own lives as examples worthy of following!
