Hello everyone! Things have been insanely busy here with classes starting and a short-term mission group arriving from Weimar Academy to help build the church in Yata as well as hold an evangelistic series. The clutch on the truck went out, and we have had a number or other unexpected challenges, but the truck is working now, and God is blessing in spite of all the challenges.
It's always amazing the way most of the students are when they first come here brand new. By the end of the year you don't really realize how much they've grown until you contrast it with the new batch the next year! Friday I had my first classes, and even though I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare, the Lord blessed me with some good ideas, and I’m excited about my classes. In the afternoon, I installed some lights and switches in the dorm for Lyli and the girls. I'm no electrician, so it was slow going. But it was certainly satisfying to get it all hooked up and have everything work despite my incompetence and all the interruptions I had. At one point I had to leave what I was doing for about an hour, so I turned the breaker back on in the meantime. When I returned I forgot that I had turned the power back on and promptly proceeded to cut a wire. The sparks went half way to the ceiling and my wire cutters were left with a burned spot in the middle. Thankfully, I wasn’t hurt at all. Just startled!
Sometimes it can get very frustrating to have students interrupting every little bit to ask a question or ask for help with something. God is helping me to learn more patience. I thought of Christ with the multitudes and I wonder how he ever put up with it. Yet he always looked on them with compassion and treated them with such love. Of course there were times when he escaped to the wilderness for a short time to have a rest too! On Thursday I had several students ask me to make them some metal dowelings to use to bunk their beds. I had them measure the size and bring me a model made from a stick, and then I found some old pieces of rebar and cut them to size and ground off the rough edges on the bench grinder. It was not a long or hard task, but in the moment it can seem so frustrating to have people ask little favors when you feel so busy and have so many things on your to-do list! Anyway, I often have to remind myself that I'm not here to get a list of certain quotidian tasks accomplished, but to minister to others.
Later I spent about an hour cutting a trail between the kitchen and the garden so I could get through to the kitchen with a wheelbarrow load of green papayas from a tree that had fallen during a recent storm. I also needed to take the compost from the kitchen to the garden as it had been piling up and no one else had gotten to it yet. When I emptied the compost, I found plastic trash mixed in with it and had to pick it out by hand! Yuck! So later that evening after worship I brought the compost bucket in with only the trash remaining that I had picked out and carried it around to all the kids to show them how unpleasant it is and ask their cooperation to not mix the trash! (We went over this many times last year and they never seemed to learn, so I thought the olfactory reinforcement might be useful this time!)
On Sabbath we took invitations cards for the evangelistic meetings to distribute in Yata. I had the kids make them for the Friday night activity. On the 6 km walk there and back (the clutch on the truck was still out at that point) I talked to one of the new students who is full of questions about the Bible and what Adventists believe. She grew up in Argentina, but her mom is Bolivian and they recently moved to Guayara. They found out about the school through her grandma who lives in Brazil and happened (I think providentially) to have her bus break down at the entrance to the school. Anyway, the school year seems to be off to a good, although hectic start. We ended up with about 45 students in the high school and 26 in elementary. There are a couple more who still may arrive. I had a neat conversation in Yata today inviting people to the meetings. They asked if we’d heard about the earthquake in Japan and it made for a nice conversation starter. I pointed them to Luke 21 and encouraged them not to ignore these signs that Christ’s return is near, “even at the door.”
And now for part two of my last story. I still didn’t get it all finished and part three will follow.
The Trojan Returns
“Satanic agencies are clothing false theories in an attractive garb, even as Satan in the Garden of Eden concealed his identity from our first parents by speaking through the serpent. These agencies are instilling into human minds that which in reality is deadly error. The hypnotic influence of Satan will rest upon those who turn from the plain word of God to pleasing fables.” {8T 294.1}
I remember being briefed about what had happened with Juan Carlos sometime after I arrived at the school in August of 2009, but I had no idea of just how profound and far-reaching his influence had been over some of the students. It wasn’t until nearly a year later when something very strange happened that I began to understand the seriousness of what we were dealing with.
When he first arrived, most of us had no idea who he was or what he had come for. He just showed up one Friday evening in August of 2010, just as we were welcoming the Sabbath. He introduced himself as Yani (pronounced almost like Johnny), a systems engineer from Santa Cruz. He had thick black hair and a plastic smile and smelled of too much cologne. Lyli and I showed him to the unoccupied room across from mine and made sure he was comfortable and had what he needed. Minutes later, Saúl, one of our seniors, showed up and began to converse excitedly with Yani as if he were a long-lost friend. That is pretty normal behavior for Saúl however, so I wasn’t too surprised, and went to the cafeteria, leaving them to converse alone, something I may not have done had I been present for Yani’s conversation with the directors and some of the staff directly upon arriving. When they asked Yani where he was from and how he had heard about the school. His response was that “he came to know about the school through a friend of his in the church in Santa Cruz.”
“Oh really? Who is your friend?”
“His name is Juan Carlos.”
“Really? What’s his last name.”
“Martinez Estrada.”
“Oh. He’s from Mexico, right?”
“Yeah.”
This was immediate cause for concern. What was Yani here for? (1).
He went on to share that he had come into the church from a Catholic background as a result of the sermons of Stephen Bohr, a name he must have known we would be comfortable with. Our concern continued to grow when, in church the next day, Ruan asked the congregation for a definition of the gospel and Yani quickly responded that it is “information to save us.”
On service day that week Saúl was going to sell granola in Guayara, and Yani decided he would like to go along. In the truck, I noticed he and Saúl off in a corner, deep in conversation. Yani was making some signals with his hand, and Saúl was staring at them intently, as if hypnotized, or at least extremely impressed. Trying to mask my concern, I moved closer and nonchalantly asked what they were doing.
“Oh, it is a logic game. I make these gestures following a pattern, and he has to guess what comes next.” Yani replied. Maybe it’s just an innocent mental exercise afterall, I told myself, but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was something very strange about this guy (2). I stayed close for the rest of the trip, making occasional comments to counteract what I perceived as some imbalances in what he was saying. For example, he was explaining that according to the Bible we should stay single. Scripture is clear that one option is not more righteous than another, yet he seemed intent on convincing Saúl that celibacy is the way for God’s true people.
During the first part of the week, Yani had confined himself to his room where he seemed to dedicate all of his time to reading and prayer,(3) apart from meals and plenty of conversations with Saúl. Saúl even showed up late to his English class, according to his teacher, “because he was in Yani’s houses talking with him. He (Yani) is very secretive in his discussions with Saúl which is not the way Jesus taught.”
On several occasions I found opportunity to casually approach Saúl and Yani during their conversations to try to ascertain what Yani was teaching, but I couldn’t put a finger on anything definite. At times he would seem to focus too much on a certain aspect of a truth, but that can happen in any theological discussion, and when I would bring out the balancing scriptures he would always seem to agree. Still, I felt that there was something odd about the whole dynamic. Yani moved and acted “like a robot on a mission,” as some of the staff put it. He made no effort to take part in any of the school activities, although I did manage to convince him to attend our education workshop on Sunday afternoon. On one occasion I also got him to take a break from his reading and get some exercise raking up the grass that I was cutting behind the house. He consented, but he only lasted about half an hour before he went inside to shower and re-perfume himself, commenting on how hard country life is. Later I invited him to join me in the chaco during one of the work periods, and he agreed at first, but later said that he needed to prepare for a meeting with the directors. He wanted an opportunity to “speak about grace” to all of the students, a request we were not comfortable granting. After his meeting with the directors the next morning, Yani agreed to end his visit to the school, and I accompanied him to town. Once in town, the first thing he did was to ask for the address of Mequias, the young man who Juan Carlos had discipled here in Guayara. Thankfully, I don’t know where Mequias lives, so I left him with one of the church elders, explaining to him the situation. Eventually Yani was able to meet with Mequias, and while I have no idea what the two of them talked about, within another month Mequias had denied the Sabbath, tithe, and other key doctrines and had to be removed from his post as teacher at the Adventist school in Guayara and disfellowshipped from the church. He retaliated by airing a slanderous denouncement of his employers on the local news, claiming that they had taken tithe out of his paycheck without his consent and claiming that the students at the school are mistreated. Church officials and the conference attorney came and easily answered the legal accusations, but the church itself continued divided. Mequias frequently visited many of the members of his home church to gain their sympathy, and many were confused by the arguments that he presented. To what extent that division and confusion continues, I don’t know, but I am sure that it continues to this day.
Meanwhile, back at the school, things would soon come to a crisis. To be continued in part 3).
1. The directors would later receive an email from one of the volunteers in Santa Cruz, apologizing for Yani’s unexpected arrival and explaining that he had appeared suddenly at the airport just as the mission plane was leaving for Guayara, and had insisted that he was supposed to go to the school. The email also warned that Yani was one of Juan Carlos’ disciples, and had been involved in the divisions and dissensions in the churches of Santa Cruz.
2. Recently I have been reading The Omega Rebellion by Rick Howard, a pastor who before his conversion spent five years studying and practicing spiritualistic and eastern religious practices. The following passage reminded me of this incident with Yani and Sammy on the truck and revived my old suspicions about what was really going on. I’m still not sure if the “logic exercise” was innocent or not, but either way, I think it is important to be cognizant of the following: “I discovered through the study of and the actual practice of meditative techniques that all the religions and occult theories that enabled their followers to contact the world of the supernatural used certain meditative practices that eventually led to an altered level of consciousness. I discovered that it was essential to learn these techniques to get to that certain mental level where I was able to contact the supernatural worlds. To leave my body in astral projection or to have any of numerous supernatural experiences, this unique corridor of the mind must be reached through certain meditative practices. These practices always involved a focusing of the mind on one thing to the exclusion of anything else. It could be reached by focusing on sounds such as music; or through chanting and repetition or recitation of words; through the sensation of touch; or the use of visual exercises. I learned that the most effective and most rapid method of attaining an altered level of consciousness was through the creation of mental images… and sustaining that image” ( p.50).
3. At one point, Carrie, one of the teachers pressed him to share with her “what he had been studying, and he said grace. She asked him to share with her what he had learned and he said it would take too long. She asked him for a short summary and he said he hoped to share it with the whole school this week. Carrie asked if he had talked to Keila or Lily, who are in charge of the worships here, about sharing with the school and he said he hadn’t but that God would provide a time for him to share. He said he knows that his trip here is not to be in vain and he feels like he has this message to share with everyone.” (Quoted from an email that Jason Churchwell, Carrie’s husband wrote about the incident.)
