"Bruised but Beautiful Feet" (Panama - June 2005)

What an adventure the last couple of weeks have been. On June 1st I traveled along with 25 others from Destiny Metro Church of Marietta, GA to conduct a church planting campaign in western Panama. We had 16 that worked in the city of David and 10 went along with me to work in the mountainous jungles of the Guaymi Indian Reservation. God was so faithful in guiding us every step of the way - literally!

After a 4.5 hour trip in a 4x4 up the extremely difficult mountain dirt/mud road I started my first section of backpacking carrying everything that I thought I'd need for the coming week of ministry in remote villages. Not even an hour into our hiking journey I noticed a problem - the sole of my boot was coming apart. The problem was that this trail out to the village called Hacha required us to traverse a thigh deep river over a dozen times and most of our walking was on sharp and jagged river rocks. As I followed my national guides I started to worry because I thought that my feet would be the key to our work for the week to come. As the sole of my boot worked its way loose I finally just pulled the thing off and endured the next hour with nothing but a soft rubber cushion between my already aching feet and the stones that lined our path. Once we arrived in Hacha I inspected my boots and realized they were just going to slow me down so I put on my Teva river sandals (heavy duty flip flops) and started to pray for my feet as I never have before.

Over the next day and a half we saw God work some amazing miracles in the village of Hacha. There were only about a dozen believers in this village of about 80-100 people and only one of them was an adult male. We knew that the potential of planting a church there would be dependent upon having a trained adult male leader. As we talked with Virgilio we realized that he had never been baptized. We spent the rest of the day visiting homes in this animistic village (religion that believes that every object is inhabited by a spirit) praying for the sick and sharing the gospel. We also invited them down to the river for a late afternoon baptism service as Virgilio had expressed the desire for his family to be baptized. As the time approached we all made our way down to the river where our national workers (all from other villages where we've planted churches in the past) sang hymns and prayed at the water's edge. I had Joshua (the missions pastor at Destiny) and a visiting Guaymi pastor work together to baptize Virgilio, his wife and his teenage daughter. It was a beautiful sight - both the baptism and the dozens of unbelievers lining the banks to watch in curiosity. After the baptism we invited everyone back to Virgilio's house for an evening meeting where we would serve the Lord's Supper for the first time ever in this village. After dark the round stick house with a thatch roof started to fill with many standing outside the doorway peering in at our service. I preached a simple message describing the Fall of mankind and God's plan of redemption culminating with Christ's substitutionary death. We ended the service by celebrating the Lord's Supper using cookies and Tang (both are available locally) and all of the believers rejoiced at our participation in the Body and the blood of Christ. I was incredibly encouraged as this is the first time I've worked to plant a house church where we actually got the privilege of celebrating baptism and the Lord's Supper - the two things that Christ commanded in regards to planting churches.

The next morning I strapped on my sandals and my backpack and we were headed out for a half day hike to an even more remote village called Oriente. Amazingly Virgilio sent his 18 year old and 10 year old daughters along with us as an offering to the church planting work! As I scrambled through rivers, across rope bridges, and along the ledges of massive river gorges, I prayed that God would establish my aching feet and keep them planted firmly on the rock. Little Judy, Virgilio's 10 year old daughter, carried a live chicken which we planned to kill and cook for supper that night. She didn't seem the least bit phased by what I would consider to be one of the most grueling and dangerous treks I've ever been on. We arrived in the afternoon at Oriente and worshipped in a small house church that had been planted there previously. I focused on training the locals by telling and acting out Bible stories that they could remember and pass on to their families and friends. We used a community house as our base in Oriente, but were focusing our work on the neighboring village of Toloste which had no church. In our 3 days between those two villages we saw 8 people come to faith in Christ, including one of the chief elders in the village of Toloste. He was what I would consider to be a "man of peace" (see Luke 10) and after coming to Christ immediately offered some of his land as a location for a new church to be established.

All of our visits were not as easy as that one. It was in Toloste that I encountered the most extreme poverty and horrid living conditions that I think I've ever seen. One family's house was built literally on top of a pig sty. As I crossed the nasty mud going into the house I entered and saw about a dozen children, some partially dressed and some naked, all filthy. Some of the infants were laying naked on the mud floor staring up at this strange white man the likes of whom they'd never seen. As we shared the gospel with this family we recognized that like many of the animistic Guaymi, they were hard and resistant. However, they did ask us to pray for their sick grandmother. I approached the mat where the older lady was covered in blankets and it was clear to me why she was sick. The pigs were running in and out of the large stick house and she was only a few feet from their wallowing mud pit. I laid hands on this lady and prayed that God would have mercy and restore her health so that the family would repent and turn to faith in Christ. As we left that house I emptied my bag of all my snack bars and dispersed them among the children praying that like the loaves and fish, God would multiply this nutrition and bring health to their frail little filthy bodies. We went from there to another similar home where we were asked to pray for a man's 12 year old son. Upon our arrival most of the village came and stood around the outside of this house peering in as we shared the gospel. We also read from the Scripture about how Jesus healed and even raised some from the dead. Several of the women that lived in this communal family house starting telling us to get out of their house. Our brave young interpreter, Joseph, quickly turned to the man and asked if he were in charge or the taunting women. He hushed the women and then humbly laid some blankets on the dirt floor. I had noticed the bulging blankets curled up in the corner when we first came in but was unable to see the sick boy until his father uncovered him, to which the boy responded with painful groans. As his father picked him up and brought him into the light I was horrified to see the little boy's head swollen beyond recognition - eyes swollen shut. His little torso was frail and disfigured with a skin rash covering it. I'm no doctor but I knew I had no business putting my hands on this child for fear that something may be contagious. Instead we gathered the team around and stretched out our hands over the boy and prayed with all our hearts that Christ would be glorified in that home and that the father would lead the home in repentance and turning to Christ. We prayed the God would do the miraculous and heal the boy. As we walked away from there we all felt overwhelmed with the challenges of the day.

We made our way back to Oriente and bathed in the river just before the evening rains set in. Little did we know that the rains would become torrential raising the river to a level that the locals said they'd never seen before. As we started our evening meeting the river had grown so fierce that we could hear the boulders under the raging surface tumbling downstream. We walked up the entrance trail to the village and were shocked to see the whole trail under the rapids. We wondered - and prayed that God would preserve our only way out and that the river would subside by morning. When morning came we were blessed to see the sun and to hear that the river had indeed gone down considerably. As we started the trek back to Hacha the trail was washed out in several places where we had to negotiate some pretty scary cliffs. Not far out of the village I stubbed a toe through the open front sandals and it quickly turned black and blue. I kept praying for my feet that they would carry me back home to see my sweet family whom I missed terribly by this point. I'm not used to being completely cut off with no communication so this trip was indeed hard for me. Little Judy was walking in rubber boots but I noticed she had one in her hand, that foot exposed to the sharp rocks. I stopped her and broke out my first aid kit and took her dirty little calloused feet into my hands and began to clean and bandage them. God spoke to me clearly that these were indeed beautful feet! I pulled out a pair of my socks and gave them to her - you would have thought it was Christmas. She ran practically the rest of the way back to Hacha!

Upon our return there we had one more evening service and several of the seekers from the village came again. It was a sweet service and I left there the following morning confident that God had indeed established the church in Virgilio's house. It looked an awful lot like what we read about in the book of Acts where virtually every church met in a new believer's home. The next morning we made our way back to the road, caught our 4x4 and made the long and grueling trip back down the mountain where we'd meet up with all the others and hear stories of their week. It was a joyful reunion where we learned that 270 people had come to faith in Christ with almost half enrolled and attending discipleship classes. God had established 5 new churches through us in the week. And in one location where I had worked last year to plant a new church, we learned that they were now averaging 60 on a regular basis where there was just the pastor's family before our 2004 campaign! All of this is a testimony to what God can do when we commit our feet to him. They may get bruised and battered, but His word promises, "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, who bring glad tidings of good things!" Romans 10:15 And just before that verse it says, "And how shall they preach unless they are sent?" Thank you for sending me out with your prayers and financial partnership . . . that makes YOUR feet beautiful too!