Today was a sad day for a couple reasons. First of all, it was sad because we left Crato today, my home for the last five weeks. It only took five weeks for me to become fairly involved in several ministries and begin to develop many friendships with both Americans and Brazilians. But the next phase of our ministry requires us to move to Petrolina, so we started in that direction today.
Category: Brazil
Day 37: The Expo Interlude
This morning I woke up around 7:00 to go running. I thought about going earlier when it was cooler, but when I woke up around 6:20 and saw that it was really cloudy, I decided to sleep a little longer because I figured it wouldn’t get too hot with the sun blocked. Fortunately, I was right!
Unfortunately it was a little humid due to rain during the night, but it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t near as humid as Iowa is during this time of year. I didn’t want to run for a whole hour like yesterday, so I decided to work on my anaerobic fitness (instead of my aerobic fitness) and do some sprints up the road on the hill. I ran up the hill and back down five times, taking a short break between each one. It was quite the workout.
Day 36: Lots of Laughs and a Few More Tchaus
For the first time in two weeks I woke up and went on a run. I slacked off way too much the last couple weeks, so today I made sure I woke up early (6:30) and got in a good run. It’s so easy in life to stop doing the good things, and once you stop, it’s hard to start doing them again!
It was by far one of the most enjoyable runs of my time here. I decided to push myself much more than I had so far, and I ended up running 10 kilometers without stopping. But what made it enjoyable was that I spent the whole run talking to God. For about an hour I tried to thank God for as many things as I could and offer up a few requests.
Day 35: More English and More Music
After the normal routine of waking up and eating breakfast, we had another round of classes, this time only with Uncle Jim. He talked to us more about missions in Brazil and the theology and philosophy of missions in general. Some of these things I remember from my missions classes, but other things were new, and even the old stuff was good review. It’s always exciting to hear how God works through people to do spread His Word.
Day 34: ENGLISH!
We woke up and had a great breakfast of cinnamon rolls with some of the leftover frosting from the cookie-decorating on Friday night. I took SO long to eat my breakfast. Frosting is SO yummy and I put SO much on my rolls, but I also took time to enjoy them, so it took awhile to finish my two.
This morning was the first of four days of classes with Uncle Jim, Aunt Renate, and Uncle Byron. Today we got an overview of the theology of missions as well as an introduction to missions in Brazil with Uncle Jim. Aunt Renate then gave us some Portuguese lessons, teaching us the alphabet and the pronunciations of the letters.
