Coming Out of Hibernation

This is a picture of MJ's cactus garden next to our house. It's raining and
you can also see the water coming down the pavilion hill in the background.

Well we made it through another Winter here in Brazil. I haven’t blogged that much at all, sorry. To be honest with you, two things took place. 

Number One: I didn’t have it in me. 

As much as I wanted to write, I just couldn’t. It was weird. It’s like I couldn’t get my brain to put-out anything of any value (in a literary sense, that is). Have you ever been so cold that every ounce of energy you could muster was used just trying to stay alive? If you haven’t then thank God because “it ain’t fun!” 

Number Two: when I did write a blog there wasn’t enough internet... 

(upload speed, that is) to post what I had written. And the only thing more discouraging than not being able to write, is to write and not be able to post. So I just gave up.

In case you didn’t know it, we don’t have heat in our house or in our car. So even though the daytime temps were typically in the 40-50’s, the night time temperatures were dipping down into the 20’s which meant that the temperature inside the house was only about 10 degrees different than what it was outside. And at the altitude we live at, everything is soooo wet and damp all the time. So add that to the cold temperatures and it’s spells m-i-s-e-r-a-b-l-e! But we made it. Now, I have relatives that live in Alaska that are probably mocking me right now but I’m not in Alaska, I’m in Brazil! It shouldn’t be that cold here, so there! 

I can tell that Spring has “sprung” because a few things have happened over the last few weeks. 

The first thing is that I’ve started getting bit regularly by spiders at night again (while I’m sleeping). I’ve also killed 2 tarantulas in the bathroom (that seems to typically be the hangout for the big ones). And speaking of spiders, I was grilling some meat outside the other night (by flashlight) and when I looked down there was a huge spider (not a tarantula but just as big) right at my feet. So I stepped on it to kill it and as I did at least 100 little teeny baby spiders jumped off of her (I assume it was a her) and started running everywhere! It was bizarre. 

And then I killed the largest snake that we’ve seen here, a few weeks ago, right in our back yard. And yes, it was poisonous. Thank you God: ) And then, if that wasn’t enough, I was informed that there was a large (about 4‘ tall) jungle cat at the obstacle course. Alimpio (the guy that works with us at the camp) walked up on it as he was walking out into the jungle in the morning. Awesome! 

But all that is just part of life here on the mountain. We’re just glad to be getting warmer temperatures. We’ll deal with all the other stuff- just keep the sunshine and warmth coming: )

We’ve got a few camps coming up within the next few weeks. We had a really good one a couple of weeks ago that I didn’t get a chance to blog about. It was a camp solely focused on discipleship. There were no games, no obstacle course, no zip line, no rope climbing... nothing but teaching and worship. And another thing that the camp didn’t have was “talking!” That’s right, the campers weren’t allowed to talk the entire weekend. It was actually pretty amazing. First Baptist Church of Curitiba is the group that sponsored it. All the guys and girls were separated from each other the entire weekend (except for times of worship). We had about 50 people at this camp. We’ve got another similar camp scheduled in 3 weeks with a different group of people so we’re very excited to have such focused discipleship taking place here at the camp. 

I’m gonna try and do a better job of blogging now that it’s warming-up (even if it’s just short ones) so that I can keep everyone updated on what’s going on here in Brazil. I’ll probably have to post several at a time whenever I go into town but we’ll just have to see: )

Love Ya!

Jim