We continued to trust God

We were finally ready to begin teaching God’s Word.

We met on the sand dune beside their palm huts. Petra was cooking soup. Pedro was gutting a deer. Dominguero was working on an axe handle. Dojeni was nursing her baby. Pigs nestled in the sand around us and chickens walked through as we all sat on the ground.

I held up my copy of the English Bible and explained to them that God’s message was written down on these "skins," and that this message was for them too.

We spent six years studying the language and the culture and building relationships with the Caño people* of Latin America. We prepared ourselves with the necessary spiritual vocabulary, figured out what would be major cultural traps and hindrances to the teaching, and determined how to contextualize the message.

We told the small village with about 16 adults that we would start a class in a few days. This message was the reason that we came to live with them. It was so important that we came from across the big water to tell them.

That didn’t seem to drum up much excitement. But on the appointed day, we met on the dune. This is where we had always hung out to visit.

After the introduction and telling them about authors like Moses and others whom the true God used to get his message written down, we began to teach.

"Pearä judirä Ütë tjamô judi cjiarëremêde." In the beginning the true God was. We camped on that phrase for many days, going through the incredible attributes of God. But I could see they weren’t that stoked about the message. It was clear they hadn’t been "waiting" for the Gospel, as so many said they were.

They had their gods, their eternal life, their interpretations and understandings of things. They weren’t looking for a new world view. Dominguero said, "Look, you guys have your god, and we have our own god. I’m not going to listen to your teaching."

And that was when the six years of relationship-building paid off. Because of our friendship, they humored me and continued to gather each day -- Monday through Friday and sometimes even Saturday. Around 5 p.m., when they were back from hunting and fishing, gathering wild roots, fruits or seeds, everyone met on the dune.

The chief of the village told me later after coming to the Lord, "Yeah, even when I was still out there hunting, I knew that when I would get back, there you would be, ready to teach us again. I got so tired of it! But even though the teaching wasn’t tasty to our hearts, we still just sat and listened."

We continued to trust God and sowed the seed faithfully. We would teach the various lessons many times over. Sometimes we would start in Genesis 1 again and go up to Abraham and then do a major review -- basically teaching the lessons all over again. It was heavy plowing. There were huge rocks and stumps and thistles in the field of their hearts that had to be removed for the seed of the Gospel to germinate.

At one point, we realized we needed to know more about a certain area of their culture. So we stopped teaching for a couple of months to study their world view. Then we taught with renewed vigor, contrasting their culture with God’s. We worked hard to show the huge difference between these two world views.

After two and a half years and more than 650 teaching sessions, we saw the first folks come to the Lord.

The first believer, Ramón, shared, "I know I am a continual doer of bad and that I have no payment for sin. But now I see that Jesus died on the cross for me. I now know that with His blood and death, He paid interveningly for me, to the One who was demanding blood and death from me. So, if He paid for me, then that is precisely where I will get my payment for sin!" Ramón was marvelously born again that day. His life changed and others followed.

Soon ten from that village had come to the Lord. Four continued to reject but the church was born! Another 75 were added about six months later. Then things began to speed up. It is very exciting to partner with the Most High and see His truths invade people’s hearts, and see them transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of Light!

* The name of the tribe has been changed to safeguard the ministry among this people group.