A long, but awesome, day on the river, continued!

Hey again! you'll probably read this post before the one below it cause this one is at the top of the page, but If you've not read the one below I HIGHLY reccommend reading it first because it is way more inciteful than this post will be haha! Today, we went out for an adventure on the river and boy was it a great day!!  As soon as Eric edits and uploads the videos of us I'll make sure to link to it so you can check them out cause we had a blast!

Our day started around 8:30 and we were at the David (pronounced "dah VEED" cause it's in Latin America) Marina by 9am.  After loading up the stuff and Aaron's 2 older kids we set off for a day on the water.  We barely made it 2 miles away from our parking spot before we hit our first snag.  For whatever reason the motor began to make a noise like my lawn mower does when it's running out of gas and then it died.  So there we were 400+ yards off the shore line, which was trees on a 70 foot tall 60% grade hill with 2 plastic collapseable paddles, over half a tank of gas, camera equipment galore, 2 kids under the age of 5, Eric, Aaron, myself and some ominous clouds rolling in... I was sure we were gonna get wet one way or the other and kept the kids occupied while Aaron (our project director) and Eric took a look at the motor to see what was up.  After about 5 minutes of being adrift, some tinkering, and some laying-hands on the motor with solid prayer the thing started right up and only studder-stepped for a couple of seconds 1 time for the rest of the day! Way to go God!!

So we topped off the gas tank at a floating gas station and made our way east to the "Meeting 

of the Waters."  This is a pretty cool sight to see, lemme tell you!  These two rivers, the Rio Negro (Black River) and Solimose (pronounced "sol-E-moinz: I don't know the translation and neither did Aaron) "meet" just east of Manaus and where they join is actually where the "Amazon River" begins.  The cool thing is that the Rio Negro is black, and I mean BLACK water, and the Solimose is this tanish light muddy color and they run side by side not mixing for many many kilometers!  So naturally we had to jump out and swim in it right on the line! :D  

When we left the meeting of the waters we rode around for abit checking out some of the floating house communities near by and also happened upon some water buffalo! I'll put up a pic of them another time, because the next thing that happened was way cooler.  We were on our way to go get some food when we saw some hibaetas (small 3 person canoes with 5horse power motors on them) with some brazilian kids and their "pets." 

By pets I mean exotic animals that they'll bring right up to your boat to let you hold and play with for a tip of a couple Reais.  So we got to hold a couple 3 toed sloths, a cayman, and the amazon's most famous creature The Anaconda!!  I liked the sloth better cause I'd held snakes before, but never something as cool as a sloth, besides the tiger I got my picture taken with when I was 8, but that's a different story. 

 Anyway that was awesome and it made my day, but there was still more to come!

After swimming and videoing and taking pictures and playing with animals we worked up a good apetite and it was a good thing too, because we had one of the BEST meals we've had so far in Brazil! There was an awesome all you can eat buffet of fresh fried fish, peacock bass, some kind of tube fish and CLEAN, FRESH VEGETABLES!! right there on the backwaters, and apparently it's a pretty popular tourist stop.  There were atleast 4 big tour boats that came in while we were there for an hour. By the way we have not had very many good veggies since we've come to Brazil cause in this part of Brazil the ants are so bad they eat everything on the ground so it makes it hard to grow stuff.  If you couldn't tell by the exclamation points and all-caps I was excited haha.  

Anyway after eating we hit the raised trail that was set up behind the

 restaurant for some good rainforest exploration action and then set out on the boat again.  God made a perfect day for our excursion with a crystal blue sky overhead and big puffy clouds everywhere you looked.  We zipped around on the backwaters for a bit and stopped to get some film for some promotions for the project before taking a shortcut through a flooded area that during the dry season we wouldn't be able to take as we made our way back to Manaus.  

Today was a lot of fun and we got a lot done as far as pictures and video collection is concerned.  We've now got most of the media that we need for the website as far as video goes.  Still pictures are almost complete too except for some candids of people of the communities and possibly some missionaries talking to Riberinos (river people).  Anyway 2 posts in one day hopefully will hold yall over for atleast a couple of days while we're editing pictures and video and look for another one of these probably tuesday or wednesday.  I love yall and I'll talk to ya again soon!

PS: There are a whole bunch of people that visit this site and read

 my blog apparently (the count is on the + side of 220 DIFFERENT visitors but i'm only receiving emails from my parents and grandmother... I'd like to hear from any of yall about anything! I'm opening the comments section to any reader and, I've recently added RSS options to the right of the page to make it easier for people to get these posts on their "smart phones" while on the go as well.  Send me stuff! If you're praying for me I'd like to know it! and likewise if there's anything I can pray for you about please let me know! 

In Christ's love -Chris Edmonds

A long, but awesome, day on the river.

  Hi all!  First off, before I get to the good stuff from today, I want to talk about why my posts have been relatively few and far between in comparison to how many their could be.  

  If I would have kept one of these blogs last semester so I could compare what's going on in my life I feel like I would have written more in a week this past fall than I have since I've been in Brazil. Despite the fact that I was so busy last semester that I barely had time to breathe, much less keep a blog, I feel like God was leading me and speaking to me everywhere I went... The key difference between last semester's lifestyle and this semester's lifestyle (so far) is that fact that I was going places and doing things, as apposed to this semester where we have been behind our computers trying to get this website up and running asap.  So far this semester I feel like I haven't been "going and doing" in God's name as much as I have in the past, and yes I realize I've gone and am doing in a different country for those of you that like to point out the obvious.  But there's a difference between going and doing 1 HUGE thing vs going and doing anything as often as possible.  Someone recently said this phrase and I overheard it, 

"A brick doesn't need a steering wheel nor anyone to operate one, because it is a stationary thing."  

That really got me thinking, the reason that I'm finding it difficult to learn the language, study the Word, and get involved with people is because our situation has allowed (or in-part required) that we remain stationary, thus not having to have God steer us or have His presence on us in a magnitude that I've experienced in the past.  Basically we're not phisically moving very much, so it's hard to feel God rocking the boat.

All that being said, our two man team will be moving and requiring the freedom to move out from this place and into the masses that we were sent to reach.  We're going to start with the English language learning school in the area and go from there.  Major prayer is needed for our new short term goals.  We have some long-er term goals that don't include anything about the website, but I'll keep you in suspense until some of those begin to come to fruition.

I didn't expect this post to be so long, so I'm going to let it be it's own post and I'll write more about what we did today in a second post that will show up above this one.  Be thinking about the brick tomorrow: 

A stationary Christian will not need God for direction, because direction is only important to things that move.  The cool thing is, though, that if you are prayerful about your movement God will take over the controls and steer you wherever He needs you to go.  

Isn't God awesome?! I pray you readers don't become bricks in your faith and I'm praying tonight that God will throw this brick (me) and shatter something as only His awesomeness can.  God is a strong enough foundation for our faith; He doesn't need us to be bricks to hold the faith in place. As believers we are meant to move check out Luke chapter 10 and Matthew 28:16-20.  I love yall and enjoy the post that'll appear above with the pictures of the backwaters and more!! -later

Fun Nights and Wild Mornings

Hey everybody! We're having a great time down here in Brazil.  There's been lots going on and the website is coming along nicely, but anyway I wanted to share a couple of videos that we've taken just for fun.  The first half is us after playing soccer with the locals for the first time and the second one is us being attacked by a ferocious killer demon/dog.  Anyway I hope yall enjoy and I'll talk to yall soon!

*PS: still be praying for our missionary families here in Manaus especially and also for the families of all of us that are out here in the mission field.  It's tough on us and our parents both when we don't get to communicate easily. *

Camping and Revalations

So, we're back from the rainforest and playing in the Rio Negro, and it was a really good trip.  When we left I was feeling pretty tense and overall not happy with a lot of the way things were going.  Let me clarify, Eric and I both thought we were signing up for a program that was already started and we would be joining missionaries that were already active in introducing people to Christ here in the Amazon River Basin area, but instead we are the first ones here, other than the career missionaries who are already here.  Also, we knew our main job was going to be the development of a website to advertise the project to bring in more prospective missionaries, but we didn't realize that our missionaries didn't really have anything else planned for us other than that.  So we fill our time with wandering the city, practicing our portuguese, cooking, eating, and other random stuff. 

 Needless to say this much time in a big city like this had me a little up tight, because i'm not used to not having trees around, i'm not used to this much traffic, and on top of that i'm not used to NOT being able to communicate with the vast majority of people that are around me...

Begin rainforest excursion: Once we got out on the water and headed towards the camp it was like a 30 pound weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.  It was like I could actually hear God again, where in the city it felt like I had lost his presence and my purpose for being here other than the website.  I swear on the way to the camp I could hear a choir singing "Sanctuary" as I looked off the side of our small boat at the puffy clouds and crystal blue sky over head and their reflection on the blackness of the Rio Negro in the distance as they met on the horizon.  Yes the river is so big that in places you'll see the horizon before you can see land.

The camp area was nothing special, except it had it's own well, a kitchen with an outdoor dining area attached, male and female bathroom facilities complete with showers, and hammock hooks galore in the seperate male and female covered sleeping areas.  Needless to say we were far from roughing it.  Still, there is something about being in the woods, where there are trees and leaves and animal sounds that can make anyone feel renewed.  And of course there's nothing like drinking freshly sterilized Amazon River haha.

However even with being away from the smog and city I was still lacking the breath of fresh air that I needed from God to remind me of my purpose here in Brazil.  On the first day we were there God showed us that he is going to surely answer our team's prayers and bless the amazonian ministry by Him producing the absolutely most beautiful sunset that I have ever seen.  The colors from that sunset will be forever burned into my memory, as will my purpose that came through scripture the next day.

After breakfast the next morning the leaders of the Radical Amazonas project got together to practice Chronological Bible Storying with one another and I went to go read my Bible.  I read a couple of different things but mainly I found myself being drawn to the book of John.  I didn't know where in John so I just started reading at the begninning and eventually got to the story of Jesus and the lady at the well and towards the end of that story, when the disciples have rejoined Jesus, I read something that brought me nearly to tears because it applied so much to what I had been seeking.  Jesus said in John 4:34-38 basically that there are reapers of the harvest that didn't plant the seeds, there are sowers of seeds that did not till the soil.  My purpose here in Brazil is to help till the soil and make it appealing for the sowers of seeds, so that with God's help there will eventually be a good harvest that will bear much good fruit.  God has a purpose for every part of the Body of Christ.  Every... single... part.  I had forgotten that and I'm glad He came along at just the right time to show me exactly who I am and why I'm here.  

I'm praising God big time today, but I'm also asking that you readers at home begin to pray for my missionary family here as they have had an unexpected loss.  I won't go into detail but, I will ask that all of you be praying diligently that they might be comforted by the one they have been called to serve.  I will post video and pictures later but for now enjoy the sunset picture I posted at the top.

Website building and more

Sorry I haven't updated this in a couple of days!  We've been "busy" but not with much exciting stuff except for a couple of things which I'll tell you about now.  

First off we've mainly been working on trying to get this website together for the misionaries that we're staying with.  Eric's been using IWeb to get most of it together on the content pages and I've been working on the intro pages and the graphics for those.  So most of our time has been spent in our room just hanging out infront of our computers...

BUT! we've had some mini adventures too which have involved us walking a couple of miles to a walmart-like store called "Carre Four," a french owned walmart-like company that is all over Brazil, going to the downtown area known as "Centro" to buy some clothes that'll help us blend in more (although we're among the tallest people in the city so the clothes don't help), and eating at a great pizza place called Splash Pizza that was on the way to Carre Four.  

Now Centro is pretty cool and has just about anything you could want from electronics and bootleg DVDs to everyday clothes of all types.  It's not where you'd want to go to buy your "nice" clothes but you can get some pretty good stuff there.  

Splash Pizza was the only really notable thing that we've done.  Apparently it's not normally like the way it was when we went, but when we got there the place was empty and we were a little early for the dinner hour so they told us to have a seat (we think) and they'd get us something to drink.  We ended up getting some Guarana and waiting for a few more minutes and then they brought us a Pizza without us even ordering anything! The cool thing about this pizza was it was several different types of Pizza all served onto one tray and we could pick and choose what we wanted off of it! So they ended up comming around about 3 times and we both got a slice or 2 off of each and by that time were stuffed and they were still bringing us stuff and wanted to serve us a desert pizza but we started to get concerned about the price so we opted out.  Anyway that was that adventure in a nutshell.  I had some video for this post but I'll have to post it another time. 

We're officially missionaries... Where was spidey when we needed em?

Yes, Eric and I are officially missionaries, and as any real missionary will tell you that's not neccessarily a good thing.

The day started out with us sleeping in pretty good and then me possibly going through the begining stages of having a parasite or some kind of stomach bug... 

Anyway we decided to get out and go get some lunch at an outdoor foodcourt thing and we had a couple of burgers and needed to go grab some groceries while we were out.  So we had a fun time grabbing some stuff at the db Supermarcado and on the way back we found the Governor of Amazonias' house and just as we were getting back to the main road with all of the cars it happened.

Two fellas that I'd noticed ride by on a dirt bike circled back and stopped right in front of me just to my right like they were trying to block our path.  We didn't think anything of it and just stepped around them and took another couple of steps, when the guy that was on the back of the bike hopped off with a .357 revolver in hand and stuck it in Eric's back.  He then proceded to ask for Eric's money and bag he had with him and then hopped back on the bike and they rode off, but they didn't mess with me.  

We've talked about it since then and decided that if we'd done ANYTHING at all besides giving them the money there was going to be a very good chance that a round would have been fired.  God definitely had his hands on us "Hands-on" missionaries today hahaha! But yea we're fine and i'm gonna post the video of our shopping excursion and the reactions from directly after being robbed and stuff so check those out and enjoy em and I'll talk to ya later.  -Chris