No, this isn’t gibberish or some alien language, but French and Portuguese mixed together. It says, “I speak a little bit of French” in French, and it says, “but I speak a ton of Portuguese” in Portuguese. I guess you might be wondering why I would write something so strange for a blog title. I will explain.
This last week I had the awesome privilege of hosting two different sets of missionaries. On Monday and Tuesday I had a friend from college visiting from Canada with her husband. Lon and Amanda Vining were recently commissioned by the North American Mission Board to work as church planters in Montreal, Quebec,Canada. They shared with us that the work there is very hard for several reasons. The people there speak English, but the vast majority of them are native French speakers and don’t care much for English speakers. They do not feel very attached to the rest of their country. They even tried to secede from Canada recently and only missed it by 1500 votes! This area is also only .05% Christian so there are a lot of people to tell about Jesus. They are trying to work with college students and start small churches on some of the 36 different campuses in the city of Montreal. Plenty of other things make the task really difficult, but just these few alone are enough to make it super tough! We have been and will continue to pray for them and we are even considering taking a mission trip up there soon.
Starting Friday, we hosted a reunion for an organization that has been building churches in Brazil since 1972! Christian Missions Unlimited had nearly 100 attendees for this event and it was so neat to hang out with the full time staff and the part time volunteers that do the work. Corie, Rebecca and I have been to Brazil (where Portuguese is the language) with CMU multiple times and it is such a joy to be with these folks again. Some of you may not know this, but my parents were missionaries in Brazil for 8 years and I spent 7 of those down there with them. As you may guess, that makes it even more special for me to have them here and get to be a part of the sharing time, the banquet, and the services. I love missionaries and missions!
By now you can tell all of us at Strong Rock love missions and sharing Jesus in foreign countries. That has played a major part in how we see camp and the future of our campers. Not only do we want to share cool things about Jesus with you, but we hope that some day you will understand how important it is to share Jesus with others, too. Our prayer is that through your time at camp you will have a desire to give to someone else what you found at camp; to make a difference in this world for Jesus.
I hope you will go on a mission trip of some kind in the near future, if you haven’t already. It will make you appreciate what you have and where you live and what God has done for you. God bless you guys!
James “Rambo”
Tags: camp, missionaries, missions, Strong Rock Camp