Long Hollow White House Campus Blog

Part Dos!  In this edition of the blog, we’ll look at the beautiful village of Ventilla where hiking takes a while as every turn makes you stop to whistle at the beauty of another sweeping view of mountains, valleys and sky.

In this first picture you can see two things, one is an example of the views that surrounded us constantly.  Crazy right?  The other is our fearless leader, Mr. Terry Parks.  If you don’t know his name now, you will in Heaven cause he’s going to be really important. 

After going on a similar trip to Honduras several years ago, Terry left his job as an architect for a successful firm in northern Louisiana to lead these trips full time.  Though a father and husband he has chosen to spend his days either raising support to go on trips, organizing teams or actually out on the field.  Throughout the trip, we stood in awe of this humble servant.  At the end of the trip before we left Ventilla to head to Ocotal and on to a hotel, I jokingly suggested we cut out the free day and hit another village.  It was obviously a joke as we were all dying and suddenly Terry looks up and excitedly says, “I’m in.”  To think that God would honor Terry’s sacrifices by making him such a joyful servant, so ready to fight for the Kingdom, made us feel like small potatoes indeed.

And here’s Ventilla!  This is us at the school we stayed and showed the film.  Here you see the soccer field and the extreme version they played.  Not only did they play barefooted or in rain boots, they played dodging playground A-frames, a shed, and two or three foot rocks.  Needless to say, we held off.

Here’s a shot of some of the wildlife in the area.  I think this monster is called a Madagascar and yes those are standard size bricks.  After the picture someone killed the bug and before we knew it one of the locals had taken it away.  Apparently they eat these bugs and who can blame them?  It looks like a great source of protein.

Here’s the picture that should get you excited.  This picture best captures the blessing of being there.  In this photo, Alex (the man with the longer hair who the kids are facing) is sharing the gospel with several children and they are responding!  Who knows how much the little one’s understood or if they really were giving themselves to the Lord, but even just to see the excitement with which they listened and tried to grasp Alex’s words was a loud testimony to the grace of God. 

Lastly, I wanted to show you this shot of a cross situated at the top of a volcano that overlooks the capital city of Managua.  On the last day as we finished up our trip and began the process of flying back and re-acclimating ourselves, we praised God.  We celebrated because God is working in the backwards country of Nicaragua and He decided to use us!  God used us to continue His work of redemption in the midst of such a dark city and country.  I count myself honored to have the privilege to sacrifice my time and comfort to see His salvation come.  Here’s the final count:

El Coco - 1st night - around 300 attended with 11 (adults and kids) accepting Christ.  2nd night - over 600 attended with 12 kids accepting Christ, one lady advised she would open her home for a church plant

Ventilla - 1st night - 130 attended with 8 adults accepting Christ.  2nd day/night - 29 kids accepted Christ when Alex used the Evangi-cube, around 300 at the movie that night with no one accepting Christ

Hey everybody!  I wanted to put together a picture heavy post as a semi-guided tour of our Nicaragua mission trip.  The goal of this post is to encourage you about missions around the world and to thank you for your prayers on the team’s behalf and making everything run so smoothly while we were gone! 

This first picture is an introduction of the team.  We had 10 Americans (Gringos to the locals) travel down to hike up into the mountains.  The two guys in the front who don’t look like their from Middle Tennessee are in fact Nicaraguan Pastors who accompanied us as guides, translators, and as spiritual leaders.  We are standing in front of First Baptist in Ocotal.  Pretty cool.

In this picture, you can see some of the locals at the first village we visited, El Coco.  We are on the Soccer/Baseball field in the village, a pretty nice one too.  They are gathered facing some of our team playing some game with the younger El Coco children.  This picture also expresses our value in a place where only one of our team members spoke Spanish.  We were a spectacle.  The curiosity that 10 Americans draw in the severely rural Nicaraguan town can be a huge tool. 

And we used that tool to draw folks to the movie.  All day we would do publicity for the Pelicula Americano (American movie) to be played at 6:30, which was about when the sun would set.  In El Coco, a big village for the area, we had 100s of folks turn up to watch the film.  Seriously.  The movies we showed were evangelistic and we showed one each of the nights we were there.  As we went to two different villages, we watched the same two movies in each village.  I wasn’t particularly excited about re-watching the movies but couldn’t complain when I found out the missionary had watched the other movie called Last Flight Out litterally over 100 times.  Probably a world record. 

At the end of the film, Alex Rodriguez, the other handsome fella in the green shirt seen in the first picture, would give an invitation and we watched all the crazy junk we had gone through, all of our discomfort and anxiety, washed away in a beautiful flow of God’s grace.  Over the course of the trip we saw 60 Nicaraguans come forward.  In El Coco, we saw 23.

This is a picture to show you a little of the Village life.  You can see two different homes in the background and this fella crusin’ the strip.  A bit of a show off really.  The villagers would have these animals, and more, just walking around everywhere.  The bulls were pretty big, but nobody seemed to scared of them so we acted tough too.

 I’ve realized that this trip is a little too big for one post.  You’ll have to tune in next week for Bueno Vista de Ventilla, the Village of Beautiful Views, the second part of our Nicaraguan adventure.