D.R. Missions Trip Update #3
Below are two amazing accounts from Novalea Verno & Rachel Coldiron, who set out in different groups yesterday to minister to local Dominicans.
(Novalea) We visited a Compassion family in their home this morning. My group visited a family with seven children! When we first arrived we saw a little boy bathing in his yard in a bucket full of water. We entered the house and were warmly greeted with smiling faces. We learned that the mother was a Christian but her oldest daughter and her husband were not. Her husband works in construction and did not have any work today, which he seemed to be ashamed of. Ramon shared with him how sometimes he doesn’t have any work either. We were able to pray with them and over them and bless them with toys and gifts. What brought me to tears is that one of the little girls saw all these gifts, and instead of reaching for a stuffed animal, she grabbed a toothbrush. On the bus afterwards one of the ladies from Compassion told us to read Hebrews 6:10. It was so powerful!!
We hosted another mini-VBS in the back of the YWAM base with the locals!
We had the amazing opportunity to do another Bible distribution. I was with Delilah, Michael, Amy, Angie, and our two translators. The first house we approached had a family sitting outside. A husband and wife with their kids and new born baby (who was 13 days old). They also had, what I believe was, a relative with them. That relative was a young woman who shared with us that she had two miscarriages in the past and blamed God for them. She used to be a Christian but didn’t call herself one now. Amy shared how she also lost children but still chose to follow God. God is love and life and would never take her children away from her. We kept talking with her and the family. We managed to give them three Bibles. Then we prayed over everyone and asked God to become real in their lives. At the end we asked the woman if she wanted to accept Jesus Christ into her heart. She said no but that didn’t impact us as much as I thought it would. We blessed her and walked out with faith that God would meet her where she is and that she would come to know him.
After that we kept on walking and approached two women playing a board game outside. The adults of the group got talking with them and started to pray over them. Michael and I were in the back of the group and saw these two girls hanging outside a little store. We started to talk to them in our broken Spanglish. They were the sweetest things! We asked them if we could pray for them and they said yes. After praying for them I asked one of the girls if she had a Bible at home. She said her dad had one but I felt called to give her the one in my hand. When I gave it to her she held it close to her chest and had a huge smile. She left after that but soon after the adults were done praying came back with a woman and her child. The woman was pregnant. The translator explained that the little girl told her neighbor that we were praying for people and giving out Bibles! We were able to pray for that woman’s family and bless her.
(Rachel) We went out to pray for the community and to hand out Bibles. The first woman that we met invited us into her yard which was completely made of dirt. When we asked her if she was a Christian, she said that she was not, and neither was the rest of her family. The man with us from the church, Lorenzo, started talking to her and explaining what a life with Christ would mean. She shared with us that she was scared to accept Christ because of all the sacrifices she would need to make and all that she would have to leave behind. We assured her that she would gain so much more than she would leave behind, and she eventually decided to accept Christ into her heart.
After that, we went to an area where there was a lot of gambling and drinking. Lorenzo started preaching to the group and immediately everyone was silent and gave him their full attention. As he spoke, several more people from around the neighborhood trickled in and began to listen to what he was saying. At the end of his discussion, several people came up to us for Bibles, and we actually ran out of them. After that we went back to the center to get more Bibles and then went out again to distribute more. As we were walking back, our translator told us that it was actually amazing and very strange that the men there would stop gambling for ten minutes to hear a sermon and be so open to it. He said that it was an area that even the local churches would not go, and that it meant so much to the people there that we would even go into the same area as them and take the time to fellowship and share the love of Christ with them. When we went back out, we were invited into one woman’s home, and she began to get chairs from inside the different rooms so we could all sit down. Lorenzo began to speak to her and she told us that she had cancer, and that she wanted to accept God in her heart, but she felt unworthy and that she had to prepare herself to be good enough. We told her that the Lord wants her as she is, and that He loves her for who she is. I told her that He wanted a relationship with her, and that He wanted to live inside of her. Another local woman told her that Jesus is already standing outside the door of her heart, and that all she needed to do was to open it and invite Him in. Because of that conversation, she then wanted to invite Jesus Christ into her heart, and to accept Him into her heart. We were able to pray that prayer with her and not only invite Him into her heart, but also into her home. We were able to give her a Bible and then pray against her cancer, leaving with faith that she would be completely healed. After that we encountered two women talking in the street, and Lorenzo began to speak to them. He told us that one of the women was a Christian, but the other was not. Both accepted Bibles excitedly. The non-Christian invited us into her home and decided to accept Christ into her heart.
As we were getting ready to leave, I felt the Holy Spirit leading me to ask her if she had any pain in her body that we could pray for. She told us that she had very bad pain in her stomach and in her back because of kidney stones. I was able to pray over her, and I’m not sure if she was healed because the translator couldn’t get everything, but she told Lorenzo very excitedly that she wanted us to go to her neighbor’s house and pray over her. When we got there, she got chairs for all of us to sit down, and she told us that she was not a believer. We were able to pray over her, and Lorenzo explained to her that she needs Jesus to have fullness of life. He then prayed over her in Spanish and she began to weep. She accepted Jesus and a Bible. In total, our group handed out 23 bibles and saw four people saved.
MINISTRY TESTIMONIES - FAST FACTS
-Group 1: 23 Bibles distributed
-Group 2: 8 Bibles distributed - three people rededicated their lives to the Lord
-Group 3: 8 Bibles distributed
-4 PEOPLE SAVED!!!
TOMORROW'S SCHEDULE
7:30 am - Breakfast
8:30 am - Devotional
9:00 am - Depart for Ministry - Community outreach event
1:00 pm - Lunch
4:00 pm - Return to housing location
6:00 pm - Dinner
7:00 pm - Devotional - Prayer - Why & How Do I Pray?
9:00 pm - IGTV Live Cast (@pccyork) with Novalea Verno & Co.
PICTURES!!! Thanks to David Coldiron, YWAM Base Director, Malcolm Taylor, and others, we have a multitude of fun shots of our group! See below.