By Elizabeth Prata
Sometimes I mourn the lost years of not being able to serve Jesus because I wasn’t saved till age 42. But I know the Lord’s timing is perfect. How he put up with my four decades of sin is an amazing testament to his patience.
I mourned of loss of years serving Jesus when I was in Europe seeing the great cathedrals and the great art- I’d have known the biblical stories behind the David or the Annunciation for example.
But God’s timing is perfect. At least I know those stories now and can praise Him for His work on earth for sinful humans.
In the 1990s I traveled a lot. I spent a month in Ecuador. We spent 4 days in the border town called Puyo adjacent to the rainforest. In the mid 1990s it was like a frontier town in the Old West. A mud street with boardwalk sidewalks, a few businesses, a restaurant and a hotel. Rainforest looming over, its boundary demarcated but always encroaching and striving to recapture the ground it had lost when the village was carved out of the dense foliage.
One of the businesses along the main street was a casket company. Apparently it was the thing to create the four corners of the casket concave and install in each corner a garishly painted mini statue of a saint. Then put convex plexiglass over it, forever enclosing the little statue inside its hole to keep watch for the body inside? I guess?
Another guy was building a copper still. We watched his progress over the days we were there. He was building it by hand, hammering the copper himself, a craftsman.
As I recently thought about my time in Ecuador, and our days in Puyo, it occurred to me to look up the distance from Puyo and Arajuno, Jim Elliot and Nate Saint and the others’ camp. In 1952-1956 those men were the famous missionaries making contact for the first time with the violent Amazon tribe called the Aucas. It was 40 miles. Just 40 miles away from where we stayed, the missionaries and their martyrdom had made such an impact for the Lord. I wonder if any of the people we interacted with in Puyo had known the men or were converted by their efforts.
I didn’t know the story of the men who were speared in the jungle just 40 years and 40 miles from where I stayed. I was oblivious to the spiritual battle that had taken place in that spot. I was ignorant of the fallout and whether Christianity had taken root where I was sitting all those days, drinking milky coffee on the verandah and watching the roosters strut up the street. I was just looking at the jungle, watching the copper still get made, and curious about the caskets.
The pagan’s mind is on things of this earth. But we have the mind of Christ. Therefore,
Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. (Colossians 3:2)
Sometimes I wonder why the Lord does things the way He does, but I know that His ways are all good. Now that I’m transformed by the grace of God from earthly-thinking pagan to daughter of the Most High with a transformed mind, it all just makes me try and be sure not to miss any opportunities to share Him now that I am saved.
the-end-time.org 