It’s November and we are just 80 days or so away from getting on the plane to head back to what we called home 10+ years ago. 
I personally have felt many ups and downs during this process, but thank the Lord for allowing us plenty of time to process this change.

Nate working hard on math on the porch, away from the noise of the others in the living room.

Chelsea and Makenna working hard!

Maddy working on math, looks like Hannah already did her work and was playing outside.

 We have been on a good home-school schedule trying to get most subjects done by Christmas or at least by re-entry to the States. 

Church life…
Church life is going well. We are working with our leadership team to get them ready for walking on their own.

Chico and Nilza, our main leaders in Maribel

Chico and Nilza will be/are the main leaders of the Maribel church. 

We had a gal come back to the Lord a few weeks ago. I have had a few conversations with her since and asked Nilza to start discipling her. It brings joy to see discipleship happening and watching folks grow as they learn to walk with Jesus and show the way to others.

Alem do Veu

It took nearly 18+ months to accomplish a panoramic study from the Bible, but we did it!!!! 
Our friends, Steve and Sonia Armour, missionaries currently in Natal, Brazil, have worked many years developing this bible study in Portuguese. We were blessed to visit them last year and give them an update on our group. With the crazy, unpredictable culture of river folks, they were awarded certificates of completion. Some gave testimony that it helped them gain more knowledge and understanding of the Word of God and as Chico mentioned, it is the most treasured thing we have, the Word of God.

Chico with his certificate

Nilza with her certificate

Our Maribel Alem do Veu Graduates

Visitors…

We have had lots of visitors from Altamira and Maraba last month. The Snell Family are the newest missionary family living in Maraba and it was a mission for them to come all the way out(nearly 1000km) to see the work and bless us with bringing our sweetest Brazilian friends, Monica and Ivanildo and their family. It was a great surprise that they could also bring their kids(our kids were super happy) and a miracle that they could get the time off of school to come! We took them on a 3 day trip up river to visit communities that we regularly visit. We had 3 people give their lives to Jesus. Ivanildo shared and it was like a knife cutting through butter. We have visited this community many times and never had one salvation. We just kept planting seeds of friendship and watered them along with sharing the Lord with them. The Lord gave us a great gift in seeing hearts respond to Jesus! We were kissed by the sun and many mosquitos during that trip and the kids all did well!

Prayer time was very fruitful!

Special time of prayer over the youth in the village

A last good bye to this family and neighbors from Sao Fransisco!

Catching fish and eating mangos on the way.

Nate and his best bud, Marcos. Their birthdays are just one day apart!

Maddy, Bruna and Makenna in one last embrace.

Load ’em up and move ’em out! Jen, Phil, Ivanildo and Monica all piled in with the kids and heading back to Maraba! Thanks for the chocolate and s’mores, it was what the dr. ordered!!!!

Last weekend we had another missionary couple, Art and Cyndi Rae from Altamira come. They also brought a Brazilian couple we have known, to visit. They blessed us with lettuce, cheese, meat and watermelon!!!! It was a great treat!
We made homemade pizza with cheese in Maribel for the first time ever!!! Thanks Rae’s!

Cyndi Rae, Sheyla, Maddy and Makenna fixing up our pizzas in our kitchen in Maribel

Short and Sweet, praying before the Rae’s and our friends before they head back to Altamira.

Art giving the Brazilian thumbs up! Thanks for coming guys! We look ahead at travel for the next week or so. We are traveling up to Portel, where our co-laborers, Richie and Christie Bouthillier, who were in Porto de Moz, have started a new base much further up the river and onto the Amazon River. We will say our last good bye’s to them and a few of the Brazilians that moved there to help them plant a new church and work on the filter project there.

Maddy won “mustache” stickies from a treasure hunt!

Maddy surrounded by friends from Maribel

Maddy will celebrate her 12th birthday on Wednesday. The following day we will travel to Porto de Moz to see all our old gang, youth that are 6 yrs older now and some who have married and are starting families! It will also be our last good byes to them.

Our first visit to Porto de Moz in 2004. Lots of bbq’s on this beach,  relationships built, baptisms and relaxing family days happened here.

Our first months in PdMoz, taking the kids for a walk! Richie and Christie had little ones too and it was great fun!

We appreciate your prayers this week as it will be emotional for us all saying good bye.
We plan to return to Brazil to visit but we just don’t know when we’ll see all of these folks, whom we love and will miss as they are all so spread out in the region we have lived these past years. 

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Do You Believe In Miracles?

Three weeks ago we packed up our Kombi and with our family and four youth from our church drove the bumpy dusty Transamazon Highway to a conference on Healing in the Streets in Altamira.  I had no idea that one of the first miracle healings I would witness would be my own.
 The day before it happened, I admitted to someone that I was a bit of a ‘doubting Thomas’, that I would have to see or experience something like a limb growing in order to believe it.  The next night at the conference on ‘Healing in the Streets’, the speaker, who was from Ireland and therefore being translated, asked if anyone in the audience had one leg shorter than the other.  My hand seemingly involuntarily shot up.  Because everyone else didn’t understand what he said until it was translated, I was the first one.  He called me up and I was immediately surrounded by 300 people and regretting having put my hand up.  He explained that Christ gave all His disciples the authority to heal the sick.  Just as the Apostles did, they spoke to the problem and to it told go in Jesus name, and that because we are disciples we have the same authority.  At that he gently held my feet in his open hands and told my back to be straight (I was diagnosed with mild scoliosis when I was twelve) and I felt something shift in my back and I think I stopped breathing.  He then told my leg to grow and….well….it did.  There was a loud collective gasp from the crowd as they watched my leg extend to meet the length of the other. I was in shock, my leg just grew, I felt it move through the leg of my shorts as it did.  Turns out that even when I experience something I still have a hard time believing it.
This visual miracle was a great faith booster for our youth (and me!) and they were excited to hit the streets the next day praying for the sick.  We lined chairs up in a busy market street and offered to pray for passersby.  We saw many people healed of pain, bone growths shrink, eye infections disappear and hearts that were broken revealed and healed.  We are bringing this ministry to Maraba, with hopes to visit different parks every month, with worship, dance and theater performances followed by prayer.

In the Bible, when Jesus healed someone he often told them not to tell anyone about it-and of course they did the exact opposite and shouted it from the rooftops.  Many have discussed why He might have told them not to tell anyone.
I posted about my miraculous leg growth experience on Facebook and to my dismay found that it led to a huge debate about the reality of the love of God and miracles between my Christian and non-Christian friends.
In Kevin Dedmon’s book ‘The Ultimate Treasure Hunt’ he says “most people do not come into the Kingdom through a well-developed argument.  They come through an encounter, whether it is a personal testimony of how someone else encountered God in some way, or a supernatural encounter in which God revealed Himself to them in a specific way.  The reality is a man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.” Although I believed that God could heal anything, clearly before my own encounter, I still had some unbelief.  Because of my own experience, my own encounter, that unbelief is gone.   When God demonstrates His love through physical healing, the veil between heaven and earth is opened and we are able to experience the ‘not yet’ in the here and now.
We want to introduce the people in our neighbourhood, in our city to a loving and living God, through personal encounter.

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Why Are River Trips Important?

We can reach out to remote people, help those on the margins of society, and follow God's heart of compassion.  

Follow the link to watch the video….

Support the Simon Family (click the link to support our ministry)

Support National Church Planting

Sunrise over the Xingu River

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The kids love the chacara (church property) even more when it is fruit season. But some of them are kind of untrained. This week when some of our leadership was travelling, we were less able to keep a close eye on their activities. They ended up moving a hose out of our view, playing with water for hours, and left the water running overnight, which eventually burnt out the water pump. Then they got into our old car, which we are trying to sell. They found some powder graphite and sprayed it all over inside and outside of the car, making a terrible mess. If we can keep loving them, having patience, keeping the big picture, who knows the plans God has for these kids? And when you hear their stories, it really helps.

Thais, who is up in a choke-cherry tree, is one of the girl’s good friends. She has a cute little baby, Melany.

The children bring bags so they can take home the fruit on our trees.

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Bella is 16!

Bella turned 16 years old today! We made mango pie and vanilla ice cream, to celebrate.

First Birthday Celebration Without Mom, (but we celebrated together throughout the day via Skype).

Emma and Bella collected two buckets of Bacuri Mangoes.

Bella tested two mango recipes, and they are both good.

Birthday Breakfast.

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Bella got her inspiration one day this week from The Screwtape Letters, a book by C. S. Lewis, and from the pumpkin pie that she cooked up (her first).God gave his church seasonal rhythms, so that our celebrations (and our lives) can always have change, and they can always be the same, all at once! How cool is that?We celebrated a Canadian October tradition in Brazil, and it was delicious. I wish you could have been here. Have a great week. Warmly, Bella and Rick.

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Monday morning Emma, Bella, and I, were sitting at our table, luxuriating over a meal after an exhausting week-end, which included the big wedding on Saturday, the baptism, preaching on Sunday, and studying almost every free second until 4 a.m. Monday morning (midnight PST) to submit a university essay, worth 30% of my grade. We were telling stories, and enjoying fried eggs, potatoes, tomatoes, bacon, and fresh mangoes, which fell from the tree right outside our front door, suddenly the dog was barking and there were people at the door. “Could you take Bruno to the hospital!?” Then I remembered that at some point during the week-end Phil told me that he had taken Bruno’s grandma to the hospital. She passed out from all the violence in her home (which shares a wall with our church property) when the police came in and arrested Bruno. He had gone on a kind of rampage, I’m not sure why. Now, Monday morning, he had a broken knee. I took him to the hospital three times this week, and he is scheduled to get surgery next week. Bruno told me “William was arrested and thrown in jail last night.” When I told Bella, she told me that William’s girlfriend was pregnant. Bruno used to want to be a missionary. Bruno, William, and many others participated in church programs. Now they are repeating the stories their parents passed down to them. Bruno wants to reform his life. Please pray for God to transform him. There is so much pain in broken families. At least two of our neighbourhood families had no food in their homes this week, and lots of children. We brought one of them some basic supplies. Our hope is to help transform this neighbourhood. I think of 1 Cor 1:26b, 27 “Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth, but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong.” Maybe God will raise up a harvest of missionaries from this violent neighbourhood, people who will serve God with complete abandonment. We have three major goals: 1. Help develop the local church. 2. Build a training center and host regular events. 3. Plant many more churches, especially among the unreached. We are low on support. I say this just so you know. (1) We need funds for building maintenance and improvements (2) We need a caretaker home in the church yard so we have someone to keep an eye on things. We need funds to develop the training center, (3) especially an eating area, and (4) a new shop, so we can use our existing shop for a conference teaching room. One day this church will have enough offerings to care for itself and to help many others. Right now you have an opportunity to invest in a startup organization that will produce missionaries, healthy families, and countless acts of kindness until Jesus returns.

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Nine People Baptized!

Last Sunday morning many of our church members had breakfast together and walked down to the river on the edge of the church property to baptize nine more people. Felipe was in trouble with the law not too long ago. Now he is training for the worship team, and his life is turned around. Other baptism candidates included Eliete and her daughter Shianne, the Snells daughter, Faith, the Leao’s daughter, Bruna, and several others. It was a great morning.

Phil, Felipe, and Monica

The Tocantins river, at the foot of our property.

Phil, Monica, Jen, and Ivanildo – the baptizers. (They paired up so there was one fluent Portuguese speaker per team).

Nine people were baptized at the river this morning.

Marques led worship.

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First Josias started coming to our church. Then a girl started coming with him. They are both not from our immediate neighbourhood. Here is how some conversations went. “Who is the new girl?” “Josias’s girlfriend.” “Ohhh (and an opinion).” After several months, Josias and Vanessa started to think seriously about marriage, and Ivanildo and Monica set up regular pre-marital counselling meetings.

Yesterday, at the wedding feast, at about 10:30 at night, I was walking along the food line-up, talking to people, and reflecting on what a beautiful wedding it was. One of the 14 year old girls had a different expression on her face, so I stopped. She said, “One day I am going to get married.” It seemed to me like this was a new thought for her. Many girls in our neighbourhood get pregnant young, and go from their boyfriend’s house, or his mom’s house, and back to their mom’s house when things don’t work out, and many relationships are full of pain and difficulties. The beauty of a community of people supporting a young couple as they make marriage commitments is very profound.

Vanessa

“I do!”

Married!

The church transformed their front yard for the wedding.

Huge amounts of food capped off the evening celebration.

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