Poza Verde Ladies Retreat

As I drove into Poza Verde on Friday I knew right away we were in for a treat. There were already ladies sitting on the ground in circles outside the church chatting and waiting for things to begin. Mirtha and I have been planning and praying for this ladies’ retreat for about 4 months.

On Friday my team leader, Toni, taught 2 different sessions covering the topics of “Security of our Salvation”, “The Christian Walk”, and “The Work of the Holy Spirit”. There were probably about 50 ladies from about 7 different communities. Toni is a great teacher and all of the ladies were very attentive. On Saturday my dear Bolivian friend, Elva, gave a great message on the armor of God and how to deal with spiritual warfare. It was great that an indigenous woman could speak to these other indigenous ladies about spiritual warfare since their culture and perspective is so different than that of North Americans. I think coming from Elva the lesson was so much more relevant.

Elva teaching the Armor of God

Saturday afternoon we set up our little makeshift clinic and saw patients. Toni along with 2 other doctors did all the work of seeing everyone. I worked as a pharmacy tech, finding and counting pills to hand out to the patients. We saw probably around 70 people. It was a long day, but a good one.

On Sunday morning Toni spoke again. She spoke of Deborah and how God used a woman to raise up her people to come back to God. Toni exhorted these ladies to be strong women of the faith, to speak out against the vices and problems that the youth are getting into and to be leaders in their communities. The women who came are the wives of leaders in the communities. Each woman could have a huge amount of influence if they wanted to exert it in their communities.

The whole thing ended with about 2 hours of women standing up and giving testimony to what God is doing in their lives. Unfortunately it was all in Ayore so I couldn’t understand what they were saying with their words, but with their voices and their actions I could tell that God had been speaking to them this weekend. Thank you to all who prayed for us!

Noah enjoying the kids

Some of our awesome helpers keeping the kids occupied so the moms could concentrate