Thank you, Uncle Sam

I got my stimulus check last week! I turned right around and stimulated my mission trip account.

"What mission trip?" you say.

Thanks for asking! I'm on a team from Houston's First Baptist Church that's going to the Amazon Basin in Brazil. We're leaving at the beginning of August and will spend a week living on a boat, traveling up the Amazon River, visiting small villages along the way.

I'm calling it Xtreme Missions (sounds so trendy that way).

We're going to meet a people group called the Quilombolas. They have lived in Brazil for a couple hundred years and are descended from African slaves. They're a peaceful people, but are a little wary of strangers. We plan to bring in supplies and lessons to help them develop clean water and hygiene practices. This will help us to build trust with them and provide a foundation for sharing the gospel. We know very little about these people, but we believe that many of them have never heard of salvation through Jesus Christ.

They practice spiritism and animism. They live in small villages of about 300 people and they keep very much to themselves. They are very poor and mostly illiterate.

We have a lot of supply-needs for this trip and I will be fundraising to help pay for the travel costs. I'll be sending letters to some of my readers, but if you're interested in giving to the mission work in the Amazon please let me know. We need to collect things like soap, shampoo, toothpaste, tylenol, bandaids, flip flops etc. The need is great, but I believe for most of us it is a very small sacrifice to give out of our abundance to help those who have so little.

And of course, your prayers are needed and appreciated.