A couple of boats long the Xingu River on an overcast afternoon

What a great time.  I recently returned from a boat trip on the river.  It was an awesome four days, filled with adventure and seeing the Lord work.  Each trip is always filled with many small incidents that make the memories.  And each trip gives insight into how the Lord works and how He works through the culture. 

I will start at the beginning… which starts several days before the actual trip.  I took the speedboat into the shop to get some work done on it.  There was a check list of things to fix on the speedboat and the trailer.  So I drop the boat off with instructions for what needs to be done and then drop the trailer off at a different shop to get some work done on it.  But to get the trailer fixed, I needed to take the manager of the shop around town in my truck because he doesn’t have his own vehicle.  One of the places that we stopped promised to have the part to the shop that was fixing the trailer within 30 minutes.  As often happens, that 30 minutes turned into almost two days.  That set our trip back. 

                The team I was taking out on the river was planning to leave on Monday and rendezvous with another some people from another church to visit, evangelize, and train along the river.  It was important to get things ready because of the different people involved and the need for coordination between them.

                After picking up the manager of the shop where the trailer would get fixed, I took him around to five different shops that in the end took me all morning (8:00 to noon).  But it is interesting to appreciate something about the culture.  The manager wasn’t upset, in fact, he seemed happy to get to know me.  This is one of the signs of the highly relational context that makes up Brazilian culture.  And learning to roll with this makes the experience and time enjoyable instead of stressful.  That is, instead of the thinking that I am wasting time running around town, realizing this is an opening to build a new friendship.  It also is one of the keys to understanding the God moments that provide opportunities for expanding his Kingdom where I am.  Think about it this way:  Can we be sensitive to what God is doing in the moment or are we so locked into our timing and agenda that we miss His big picture?  We need to take time to slow down and listen to what God is doing around us each and every day.  

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