Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Dios te bendiga

I wish I could understand prayers in Spanish - they sound so melodic and full of praise.

"Dios te bendiga" means "God bless you", by the way.

I really must share a story with you that serves to remind me of how God moves and changes people's hearts. While we were in Chile, we took a charter bus everywhere. Chile is divided into 12 regions and we were in the ninth region, but had to travel around the region to get to the various distributions. Most of the places were around 1-3 hours away, so that meant a lot of time on the bus with the same people and the same driver. We prayed on the bus at least four times a day, for safety, in thanksgiving, for the shoeboxes, for the kids, for each other, etc. After the first distribution, our leader asked us to pray for the bus driver, who he assumed was not a believer, since one of the NLT pastors spent the entire bus ride speaking to the driver about God. So of course, we prayed.

We actually had two bus drivers, one for the main bus and one for the smaller bus that held a portion of our group. Let me say, these were fantastic bus drivers. Every time we needed to haul stuff out, they were right there helping to load and unload stuff. They even joined in our fun times, like at the ocean or swimming in the river or playing soccer - just all around nice guys.

Anyway, on the second to last day (or so) we received good news - our bus driver accepted Christ into his heart! I was AMAZED. This wasn't even a fellow we had really concentrated our focus on, but through observing us and speaking to the NLT leaders, he came to see that he needed God and so he prayed for salvation. I mean, get out! The bus driver!

When it came time for all the goodbye speeches, he stood up on the bus and expressed to us how our group had impacted him. He said that in his work, he meets tourists every day but that he was so glad to have met us in particular, and to have come to know God... and he wanted our prayers so that he could share God with his family.

Our God is so amazing, so much bigger than we sometimes give him credit for.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Praise God!