Many Invitations To Itinerant Ministry

After our wonderful time in Australia, followed by three more months back in Wales, I began to receive invitations to travel to other countries, usually from YWAM leaders who wanted me to teach at their DTS schools. My first trip in February 1996, was a return to Mexico City where I had ‘lost my heart’ and heard the missionary call in 1988/9. There I made many new friends and renewed contact with our ‘daughter’ Vicky whom we had sponsored through Compassion many years earlier.

It was a thrill to meet Francisco and his family once again and to make a new friendship with Maritza Sierra, daughter of Mexico’s most famous operatic son, Paco Sierra. He was a friend of the parents of Placido Domingo, and it was to him that Placido dedicated his first performance of Othello at the New York Metropolitan Opera House, because “you are the finest Othello I have ever heard.”

Besides teaching at the DTS, I was invited to speak at local churches, conduct a two-day conference for pastors, and teach a morning Marriage Seminar. Maritza, and her sister Martha, were new believers who asked me out to lunch at the restaurant of the large inner-city Chapultapek Park.

We arrived at lunch time and did not leave until well past 7pm as they asked so many questions about their new faith. What a thrill to teach such eager young women – and what a thrill to know that both are still going on well with their Lord! In August 1996, I was invited to YWAM Fortaleza in north-eastern Brazil.

Tony Lima, one of the most anointed young men I had ever met, had begun a wonderful YWAM work in this city, designated by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as ‘the vice capital of the world for child prostitution!’ My arrival came at an awkward time, as Tony had had to travel to the city of Brazilia, in company with the body of a young man who had died at the YWAM base when a gas cylinder had exploded. He had been trying to shield some others from its danger after it became detached from a gas stove it had been fueling. I committed myself to grief counseling the other students, especially the young man’s sister who had witnessed the explosion.

However, I found them to be very resilient young people, grieving for just two days and then getting on with life as they committed themselves afresh to serve the Lord in whom their trust had not been diminished.

For three weeks I taught at the school each morning and spoke at local churches each evening. This had been set up, so I had three evenings and Sunday morning at one church followed by Sunday evening and the next three evenings at another.

I had wonderful favour everywhere I went, which I am sure is due to the high esteem in which the local pastors held Tony and his wife Christine.

Back home in BC, I was invited to conduct a Men’s Retreat with ~70 men from a Baptist Church in Kelowna. This was a very rewarding time as I taught on Release – (see my book The Key in My Hand) Mexico was again on the schedule three months later, but this time a two-week trip to Peru was added. I taught at a DTS school in a lush valley east of Lima the capital city, and then was the guest of Betty Mariaca and her family in Lima. Her dad was a retired police chief - yes, the big, strong type one associates with Latin American police chiefs. It was on the last morning when he invited me to share a coffee with him. I sat at the small table with two demitasse cups in front of us as he took from his cupboard a large tin of Tim Horton’s coffee – a popular brand known to all Canadians. He had received it as a gift from a relative in Ottawa, Canada, and wanted to share it with his Canadian guest.

There followed invitations to India and Nepal before we would return to Australia to answer to the invitation of the C&MA president in 1995. Evidently, the Lord was opening doors before us and confirming my future ministry, as I had not sought any of the invitations that were now coming to me. I had written no letters, made no telephone calls and asked for no monies to support my ventures. Now, I had no regular income from a church board. God had to prove Himself my Jehovah Jireh – and He has certainly done that!