Pedicide

Please pray for me. Yesterday I remembered just how important prayer is. The day started well. Juan, Anita and I spent the morning collecting bananas and cutting bad banana trees in a big field surrounded by swamp. After a morning of work, it was time for a little fun.

We set out with Juan’s rifle to do a bit of hunting. Between shooting a coin off of a tree, and bagging two animals with two shots, I really impressed everyone with my shooting ability. The pride that this caused was very dangerous.

I went with Juan that afternoon to examine a broken boat motor, and after that, he wanted to show off my shooting ability to a friend, so we got in the boat and went hunting. As you can probably imagine, a moving boat in a river is not the best position to shoot from, especially when your target is high in a tree and is barely larger than a squirrel (no, we were not hunting monkeys).

I spent 5 shots and managed to hit my target once or twice, but it did not fall from the tree. We decided to disembark and try again from the ground. We walked a short distance and then, POW! The gun went off in my hand. As we were hiking on the island, my hand must have pushed the safety button to the fire position because a branch managed to snag the trigger of the rifle and set it off. Luckily it was pointed at the ground, but this frightened me greatly because the bullet hit the ground only a couple of feet from the foot of a boy named Kenny who was hunting with us.

I have learned a lesson about pride, but also about prayer. If things had gone differently and the rifle had been pointed at Kenny rather than at the ground, I don’t like to think about what could have happened.


On a slightly happier note.

We went to Jobo on Sunday. Jobo is a small town on the San Juan River that is located half in Costa Rica, and half in Nicaragua. There we met in a school house to hold a Sunday church service. Anita preached, and Juan and I lead children’s bible study and memory verse. It was a great learning experience, and a great opportunity to share part of God’s word with the people of Jobo and especially the children, who outnumbered the adults 19 to 3.