Day of the Dead

We have found that in each culture there are different celebrations honoring certain people. In Costa Rica they had a big celebration to honor the farmers or their country. Here in Ecuador they have a celebration honoring the dead.

Every year on November 2nd as a result of the combination of Catholic and indigenous beliefs, the Day of the Dead takes place among families. They see it as a way to "catch up" with the ones who are no longer with us but have a life in a different world. People pack lunches of traditional food, flowers and offerings for the dead and head to the cemeteries where they spend the day as a family talking, eating, cleaning up the gravesite and speaking to the dead person. Ceremonial foods for this festivity include colada morada, a thick purple drink served hot made with raspberries, blueberries, cinnamon, pineapple and other fruits. To some this drink symbolizes blood showing the life of the ones that have moved on from this existence. The other traditional fare is the guagua de pan. This is a piece of bread shaped like a person. They decorate the bread with icing and it often has a filling of guava paste, chocolate or cream cheese inside.

Although the tradition of visiting the cemeteries has declined in the urban areas, it is still very common to see the bread and morada sold here in the stores for celebrations in homes around the city. Last Tuesday at our national women's Bible study I took my neighbor, Adrianna, to celebrate the holiday together at the home of one of the ladies from the study. She made the colada morada from scratch and we had two types of guagua to eat. The drink made fresh is wonderful. I tried to make it at home with a mix...not so great, but fresh, fantastic! The bread is a little sweet and really good with the guava filling.

The children at school even enjoy this tradition as all 3 of our kids had parties in their respective classrooms. Cade's daycare combined Halloween and Day of the Dead with having the children decorate their own bread and having them wear costumes and hunt for candy. I was told that Halloween in not permitted here in Ecuador as the current president does not desire for any foreign holidays to be a part of Ecuadorian culture. I don't believe the people necessarily care about that because plenty of moms, dads, and kids were enjoying their little version of trick or treat at the party.

One interesting fact is there are 3 national holidays over this same weekend. For the celebration on November 1st, All Saints Day, they have colorful parades and festivities in the southern provinces of the Sierra honoring their favorite Catholic saints. The 3rd of November marks the Independence of the province of Cuenca, so it is a 4 day holiday weekend for us.

Fall is Here

Last week was a great time for us as we received our crates from the U.S. We spent most of the weekend unpacking boxes and rediscovering old memories. Every once in a while I could hear one of my children exclaim, "Wow, look at this! I didn't know I had this!!!!!" I too was excited to open up my kitchen things and most especially all of my family photos.

We are almost done unpacking now and one of the wonderful things we discovered were some of our fall decorations and Halloween costumes, just in time for the fall festival at school on Saturday. Here are a few of the photos of the kids from the festival. It was a fund raiser for the high school students to go on an upcoming mission trip.

The picture of Kayleigh receiving the roses is one of the fund raisers, roses and kisses. She received a rose from each of the men in her life, Daddy, Connor, and Cade. It really made it feel like fall for us, especially since the rainy season has started.

Thanks again to everyone for their prayers over our crate. We received most everything we packed and are only missing one box of china and some shoes, so we are very grateful to finally be settled in.

$4

Expendability

A few years ago I knew I heard God speak to my heart as I sat in a dark theater watching the movie "End of the Spear". Little did I know, I would find myself just 3 years later in the very country where those 5 great missionaries, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian willingly gave their lives to share the gospel with the Huaorani people.
Last weekend we had the opportunity to go to Shell, Ecuador, the home of Nate Saint and the MAF mission and landing strip. We saw the building Nate had built to house visiting missionaries. Unfortunately it is in bad repair these days for lack of funding to keep it up, but there is so much history within it's walls. Before dying on Palm Beach (the site of the attack) Nate Saint spoke the following:


"...This very afternoon thousands of soldiers are known by their serial numbers as men who are expendable. During the last war we saw big bombers on the assembly line, row after row, powerful, costly implements of war! Yet we all knew-we actually knew that many of those bombers would not accomplish even five missions over enemy territory. We also knew that young fellows, many of them volunteers, would ride in those airborne machine-gun turrets, and their life expectancy behind those guns was, with the trigger down, only four minutes. Tremendous expendability!
We know that there is only one answer when our country demands that we share in the price of freedom, yet when the Lord Jesus asks us to pay the price for world evangelization, we often answer without a word. We cannot go. We say it costs too much.
God Himself laid down the law when He built the universe. He knew when He made it what the price was going to be. And the lamb of God was slain in the counsels of God from before the foundation of the world. If God didn't hold back His only Son, but gave Him up to pay the price for our failure and sin, then how can we Christians hold back our lives, the lives He really owns?
...Missionaries constantly face expendability. And people who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives. They forget that when their lives are spent and the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted.
Some might say, isn't it too great a price to pay? When missionaries consider themselves - their lives before God - they consider themselves expendable. And in our personal lives as Christians isn't the same thing true? Isn't the price small in the light of God's infinite love? Those who know the joy of leading a stranger to Christ and those who have gone to tribes who have never heard the gospel, gladly count themselves expendable. And they count it all joy.
'Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone,' the apostle Paul said. 'I die daily. I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.'
'And Jesus said, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time...and in the world to come eternal life.' " ~Nate Saint

Ecuador is a very different place today than it was 50 years ago, but there are still many who die in the jungle by the spear. As recent as 2 years ago a lady and her 2 children (ages 16 and 9) were speared presumably by a group of Tagaeri Indians, cousins to the Haurani. But here is the amazing thing; right now our mission is training several of the Huaorani and Shuar people the stories from the Bible. These men are learning these stories because they want to go to the Taromenane and Tagaeri tribes and share the good news with this unreached people group.

Before we left the US I had many people ask me why we would give up our cushy middle-class American life style to go to the murder capital of the world (Caracas) and be missionaries. Well, all I could think was, why not? I have found more joy in the last year-and-a-half of living in God's will than I had in 10 years of living in my own. Although many may consider it a sacrifice, we consider it a privilege. Maybe that is because we know that the largest sacrifice we can make is that first step, the willingness to go. I do not believe God calls all of us to go across the globe to share the gospel. We can and must share the good news of Christ with our neighbors, coworkers, friends and family. I do think however that we must be willing to go, and if indeed the Lord has called us, we will never know true joy until we heed that call.

I believe if you had asked any of those 5 men that gave their lives, or even the 9 children and 5 wives they left behind, if it was worth it to see a unreached people not only come to a saving knowledge of the Lord, but also to reach out to their enemies and share the gospel it would have been a resounding "Yes!".

To the Ends of the Earth

Caught Up in the Middle

Here are some recent pictures from our trip to "both" of the equators. The original was placed before GPS in a location by French explorers, and the last pictures are of the actual equator about 200 yards from the original. It has a museum as well as many indigenous artifacts. There are also all kinds of cool tests done at the real equator to show the difference in gravitational pull.