This advent season...

...I am spending covered in mud, wearing only my swimming trunks and digging a drainage channel for some missionaries. It´s hot in Brazil. And rainy. I was working the other day and getting so wet that swimming trunks were the only option left. Strangely liberating digging clay in the warm rain. It reminded me of being a kid. My brothers and i used to turn the hose on at the top of this soil area at the bottom of our garden (behind the hill, remember Mum?). Then we´d each build a wee river. Mine i remember was fast flowing and lined with tiny pebbles. Plenty of meanders. Deposition on the inside of the bend and erosion on the outside. Niall´s was wide and deep. Like the river Nile. I always found that funny. So as i sat in the dirt the other day with the rain fully lashing around me i smiled at the memory and was glad that all those hours in the soil weren´t wasted.

Some honesty...

...invites me to briefly tell you of two recent miracles that occurred in my life. In Guatemala, all those moons ago. I, like an idiot, went swimming with our room keys in my pocket in the massivest waves in the universe, 20mins or something before we had to check out. If you don´t check out in time they make you pay for another night. Obviously i lost the keys. Obviously they had a spare which took four years to find. tick tick tick. Obviously i got down on my knees on the sand and said: God I´ve made a mistake can you help me out? Make the keys that would never ever ever wash up wash up, so we don´t have to pay more etc. I didn´t say ´´etc´´ to God, i was a bit more emotional and went on a bit. I went back inside, i couldn´t see the keys. Not so obviously, just as we were trying to pay, some kind of angel kid walked in with our keys in his hand. He said they had washed up along the beach so he brough them to our hostel. How he knew they were the keys to our hostel i will never know. They weren´t marked and there were loads of hostels. God answered my prayer, because he is amazingly good. In Peru we had the worst day ahead of us you could imagine: Get up at 3.30am and get three flights to the most dangerous city on Earth, Rio, to arrive at some other weird place at 11pm, having slept on a bus the night before. Pretty much the worst day on Earth to wake up with the worst food poisoning you´ve ever had in your life. Vomitting and the D word like crazy. And the feeling of a rusty axe wedged in your forehead, wobbling back and forward. In so much pain you can barely move your lips, never mind talk. With vomit soaking the back of your throat up to you eye balls and making you retch all the more. Trying to go through security and immigration, between outbursts of throwing up. I couldn´t believe i made it to the departure lounge. I was just considering not going on the flight, when odd stuff started to happen. I heard an audible voice tell me to sit up. Lucia was at the toilet and the others were further away. It was no one i knew. I sat up anyway. I looked around and there was no on there. In a weird way i very naturally assumed it was an angel and didn´t think to much of it. Sitting up was good. I pleaded with God to take away the sickness. Then i thought about His love for me for a bit. Then i started crying in complete joy and something broke over me. It felt like something snapped. Then (excuse the Christian jargon) the Holy Spirit came over me and it felt warm and nice. I´m very familiar with this happening, but it´s never happened in an airport. I asked God to release His supernatural power into this situation. He did. Out loud i described what was happening. As i descibed the feeling of complete joy i was amazed because i could speak. I was standing now. I finished speaking with: And now i´m.....better!. I´m completely better. And i was! I was completely completely healed. I could still taste the puke in my throat, but that was all. I jumped (that´s right jumped, like the leper Jesus healed) on the chair and shouted a thank you to Jesus. The others were so embarassed. Lucia even went back to the toilet. I was laughing so hard, under the influence of the Holy Spirit. And the others were concerned i would be committed to an asylum, but i couldn´t stop. I went over to the infomation counter, because i realised they didn´t have the most important information that Jesus loved them and us and you, so i wrote it down on their stuff. Completely healed, raised some stares, but didn´t care. I ate all my food on the planes and had a great flipping day. Thank you God. You are so Good.

...

Stand By Me moments

You know the film. You know the song. It´s full of good moments that film. One of the worse moments, however, involved some leeches. There is a lot of ticks in Brazil. They crawl up your leg or arm, looking for a a quite warm place to nestle in and suck your blood. Some of them are about a centimetre long and as black as coal. So yeah, put all these details together and you´ll come up with what i found to my shock and horror a few mornings ago. Yes the pain and revulsion of finding a massive TICK on my inner thigh, was eclipsed and redered infinitesimal as i discovered the OTHER TICK as i prepared to go to the toilet. I´m still in counselling.

Neuvo Destino

On a farm outside Itabarito, outside Belo Horizonte, outside Rio de Janerio, Brazil, a about ten years ago something special began to grow. A lady got a dream from her God. He showed her children from the streets coming in their droves to their farm to a have a good time and learn stuff about life and Him. After a lot of discussion with her God and her husband the time came to sell the farm. Morven and Fabio bought their farm having received 36000 pounds in the space of a week from people who they hadn´t even asked for money. Then they, with a team from an outdoor adventure centre in Scotland built an adventure centre. Yesterday the second group of kids ever to visit left. The lady´s dream is beginning to be fulfilled. The name of the farm, isn´t even cheesy because it was always called that even before the vision (in the hearts of men) to give the street kids of Brazil a New Destiny. We´ve been working on the farm for a week now. Building fences, digging weeds, building football goals and lots of other stuff. Then over the weekend we were helping out in our own Portugueseless way. It´s an amazing place. So peaceful, with such good food. Lucia and I´s old pastor, Ted, is the cook. Along with his wife Deidre, Morven, Fabio, Little baby Angus (sudden excitement about being a dad, kind of overflowing), Romeo, Fred, Rory and others have made us so welcome. It´s a good place to be and there is a lot we can give. And they have a pool. If you feel like praying, pray for this place, pray for the kids. Pray for breakthrough in their lives. That they would come to know the God who loves them, when everyone else rejects them. We know God loves this place, because He built it and dreamed it, so He definately wants to use it. Lets ask Him together.

Brazil

Films not to watch before coming to Brazil: City of God and that other one. People not to talk to before coming to Brazil: A lot of people. Truth is there´s a lot of murder and hardcore crime here. The place we stayed when we first got here, someone was killed around the corner during the night. Lots of gangland wars over drugs teritories in the Favellas. Should that stop you coming? No. It´s hard when everyone you talk to seems to tell you another horror story. People say things like don´t go out of the bus station- it´s dangerous. Other peole say, don´t go in the bus station - it´s dangerous. Don´t get out of bed - it´s dangerous. Where in the contract of life does it say it won´t be dangerous. I´m pretty confident at this stage that life is not about minimising danger. Danger is part of life. Rant rant.

Team players

Let me at this late stage introduce the others: James and Anna. They are 22 and their parents live in Carlise. I met them in New Zealand on my DTS. They met at Durham. James studied Physics, Anna studied English and Classics. We work very well together. We all like Scrabble and are equally matched. They are engaged to be married in April. Lucia and i will be getting married (God willing) late in May. So we have a lot of conversations that would probably bore people to death. Anna is amazing at bargaining and always gets us good deals on accommodation and food. James is fantastic at reading guide books and organising good stuff to do. (Incidentally my personality type, ``Performer`` is the least likely to read a guide book according to the bbc website). So i value James abilities highly. Lucia loves talking to strangers and making friends with people. I´m quite cool too. Basically this is a brief list of examples of how we are different, thankfully, and flow well together. We have laughs. Recently Lucia and i went a day ahead somewhere in Brazil to meet some people and we actively missed the others. It was the first night we´d been apart since the 15th of September. We do a lot of lending eachother money and doing eachother´s washing. We have our stuff in common. I´ve found myself refering to my knife and plate as the knife and plate. It is a subtle, but important difference. We have nights for couples sometimes. It´s all good.