The Gethsemane Factor

The Gethsemane Factor

by Wayne West

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

From John’s Gospel, where the Lord Jesus said, “You have not chosen Me, but I’ve chosen you.” You know, that scripture was impressed on me many years ago when I was a teenager. Well, it hadn’t been all that many years.

Yes. I’m just glad to report that God’s Word says in the 37th Psalm that if you trust the Lord, He will give you the desire of your heart. Did you know the Bible said that? And trust in Him and He will bring it to pass. Delight yourself in the Lord, He will give you the desire of your heart. But that’s conditional, you understand, on delighting yourself in the Lord, right? And you trust Him and then He’ll bring it to pass. Yes. Well, I just want to talk to you this morning from that scripture about delighting yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desire of your heart, and explain to you how I got that jumpsuit I was wearing last night.

Now, wearing the jumpsuit was not the desire of my heart, you understand, but that sort of ties in with it. And, well, it’s a long story, all right? Well, you see, when I was growing up in eastern North Carolina, I was born in the little town called Plymouth at a very early age.

And grew up in a little town of about 4,000 or 5,000. And growing up, I’d always read a lot when I was growing up. And I was really sort of a mythology buff. And I’m going to get this where I can sit on it when I want to. Is the light okay here?

Can you see me? You don’t mind if I make myself comfortable, I hope, because I’m going to anyway. I was sort of a mythology buff. Anybody else love to read about mythology? Yeah, I always did. And I love that. And when I would read these things, I would dream of being able to travel someday to where all of these things took place. I wanted to go to Athens and Rome and all of those places. And really, after I gave my heart to the Lord, I sort of had a desire to go to Israel. But to tell you the honest truth, I was much more interested in seeing Rome and Athens than I was in going to Israel. But then, you know, God is so gracious. He called me into the ministry. And when I, as a freshman in college, God called me into the ministry, I really sort of pouted with the Lord for a while. I knew that… I felt that that was really what God wanted me to do. And I was delighted to go into the ministry. Because I would lie and dream at night sometimes about preaching to people. And knew that this was really God’s will for my life. But growing up in the denomination that I grew up in, the only thing I knew that a preacher could do would be to pastor a little church someplace.

And what I figured was that… Oh, that’s better. Yeah. So I figured that what I would do is I would be pastor of some little country church someplace all my life and would never get to go anywhere. Would never have enough money to travel. And that was really what I wanted to do. Well, how could you know at 19 years old that God would one day work everything out so that you could travel in ministry? There was no way I could foresee that. Well, when I went off to college, I had enjoyed studying foreign language in high school. And so I decided that I would be a foreign language major. Because if God had called me into the ministry, our little churches in Free Will Baptist and Eastern North Carolina, oftentimes, the pastors would have to supplement their income by working in some way. And I figured that what I was going to do was I was going to major in foreign languages and try to get a double major. It worked out that I majored in Spanish and took a minor in French, almost a double major. And figured that if I could teach two foreign languages that just about any place I would go, that I could probably get a job at a high school nearby.

You understand the logic of where I was coming from? You know, I didn’t really pray and seek God and have a heavenly vision about that. I was just trying to be very practical, you see. And so that’s what I did. I took a major in foreign language. And then I did settle down and become a pastor. And I taught high school. And we would serve two or three different churches. And… Oh, yes, I did get married in there.

What is that verse in the psalm about many are the afflictions of the righteous, but… That doesn’t mean my wife. How about the thorn in the flesh, Tim? Does that… That’s okay. All right. All right. Well, anyway… Go to your room.

I got married. We did have children. In that order. And… But then… The Lord began to open doors for us. And there’s a whole lot that goes in between. But I just want to get on to the part where the Lord began to open doors for us in CFO. I first went to a CFO in 1974 up in West Virginia. And just… It really… It changed my life. I went there at such a point of desperation. And the love of God just flowed to me in the midst of that CFO. And so we continued. I wanted to take my family. And we had this marvelous CFO experience. And then when God began to open doors of leadership for us in CFO, and when I began to speak sometimes, I knew and learned that CFO International had some camps in Spanish-speaking countries. Well, now, in 1968, when Ruth and I were still in the Free Will Baptist Church, our denomination, that really the young people with whom we worked on the state level, they raised money to send us to our mission points in North Mexico in the province of Coahuila. And because I was a Spanish major and had taught Spanish and all of that, you know, I was going to go there and we were going to do some work in these little missions in North Mexico.

And we spent five weeks there and had a marvelous experience. And so I dreamed of the time when, through CFO, I would be able to go to Spanish-speaking camps and use that training in Spanish again. Do you understand? And so finally, God began to open the doors for me to do that. And last year, I was asked by the International Board to go to Peru for the first time. Now, it had been a long time since I had been to a country where Spanish was spoken. And I assure you, brothers and sisters, that thinking in English and trying to speak in Spanish will make you shout, okay? I mean, when we were in Mexico that time, the first week, when I had to preach in Spanish… Now, it’s one thing to get up in front of a classroom of students and go through your lesson plan and all of this, you know, and you use your Spanish and all that. But it’s a different thing when you have to get up and do a message of 30 minutes, or more or less, in that language. In the first week, I thought I would go crazy. In the first week, I was just preaching away one night and I wanted to tell the people that… Let me tell you about the circumstances of it.

The first night, we were in this little building and it was so hot inside the building that the pastor said, “Well, tomorrow night we’ll move outside where there’s more air stirring.” Well, they ran the electric line, the one light bulb that was hanging down in the building. They ran it outside and hung it up on a nail right beside the building. And they put the little speaker stand right up here under that light bulb.

Well, you know, when you… What happens when you turn on a light bulb out there? There were more bugs flying around that than you ever saw. And it came time for me to speak and I got up and I had to shoo bugs off of my Bible to read and they were down minding. Have you ever tried to speak to a group of folks with bugs up and down your back? And the kids were all up on top of my feet trying to pick up these bugs. And I couldn’t figure out why. And they told me later that all of these kids had pet birds at home and they were catching these insects to feed their pet birds. But AAA does not recommend children on your shoe tops while you’re trying to preach a sermon with bugs down your back, you know? Well, anyway, I was preaching away one night and I wanted to tell the people about the great love and concern of God for us. And I was going to tell them that God, even the hairs of our heads are numbered. But I didn’t know how to say exactly that in Spanish. So I was going to tell them that God knows every hair on your head. But instead of the word cabeza, which means head, I said corazón.

I said God knows every hair on your heart. Well, they didn’t bat an eye. But after the meeting, one of the pastors came to me with a twinkle in his eye and he said, “Brother, hermano, qué doctrina extraña esta.” What strange doctrine is this about the hairy heart?

And I knew that when I went to Lima that I was going to have some of that same problem. So I went three days early so that I could start training my ear and my tongue all over again in practice, and I’d been doing my daily devotions in Spanish and all of that. And so that first week in Lima, and it was a marvelous camp. There were about 150 people at this little Catholic retreat center at Chaclacayo up in the cerros, the hills, just above Lima. It was a beautiful little place. And Mother Margarita, this little Peruvian nun with the most sparkling blue eyes you ever saw in your life, was in charge of this retreat center. And we went up there with 150 people and I had a chance to speak and it was just a wonderful camp. And one night I was giving an illustration about… to make a point. And I was telling about a friend of ours in Rocky Mount who was in the plane when her husband had a heart attack and she had to crash land the plane. And I was going to tell the people that in the crash, she survived the crash, but she broke her hip. Now the word for hip is cadera. And I thought I knew the word for hip at that time, but instead of cadera, I said carretera.

And I told the people in the camp that Janice broke her superhighway. Well, that unglued the camp for a while. And I’m not the only one that does things like that. I remember Mrs. Willie, who was a veteran missionary to Cuba, say that the first time she had to lead the singing in one of the Cuban churches, she wanted the people to stand up. And so the way you say stand up in Spanish is póngase en pie. Literally put yourself on your feet, you know. But she couldn’t remember that idiomatic expression, so she said something similar that she thought would mean about the same thing. And she said, “Levantemos los pies y cantemos.” She said, “Let’s lift up our feet and sing,” you know.

Fortunately, the people knew what you wanted and they didn’t stick their feet up. Wouldn’t that be something, a whole congregation of… One of the… And you can really get into some terrible situations like that. I remember the story about one girl who was going, I guess, in missions and she was brand new in some Spanish-speaking country. And the pastor called on her one night to give a testimony. And he knew that she knew enough Spanish that she could probably do that. But her Spanish was very imperfect like mine. And she stood up and she wanted to say, “I am very embarrassed.” Now, the word that she should have used would be confundida, which means confused or embarrassed. But she used the word embarazada, which sounds like embarrassed and it looks like embarrassed, but saints, it doesn’t mean embarrassed. It means pregnant. All right?

So she got up to the microphone and instead of saying, “Estoy confundida,” she said, “Oh, estoy embarazada,” I am pregnant. And then to make matters worse, she said, “Y es la culpa de su pastor,” and it’s your pastor’s fault. You know?

One Wycliffe Bible translator was called on to lead in prayer in his Spanish service and he wanted to ask God to forgive their sins, which would be discúlpanos nuestros pecados. But instead of pecados, which would be forgive us our sins, he said pescadores. He said, “Forgive us our fishermen.”

So you’re always running into things like that. But anyway, that’s the kind of adventure that you have when you think in one language and try to speak in another. Kind of like Tim coming from New Zealand and preaching in the United States, you understand. Amen.

But it was a marvelous thing. And I wish that I could share adequately with you the joy of knowing that God had enabled me to learn the Spanish language, to minister to these precious people. And they asked me to do counseling. Now, counseling in a camp is difficult enough if you do it in your own language. But when you have the additional problem of a language barrier… And I was very dubious about doing that, but in praying about it, I felt that God wanted me to do it. So when they came in for counseling, I said, “Talk slow and talk clearly,” you know, because I’m like… And so God… But the great joy came. The second person that came to me was a young engineering student 20 years old named Adrian. And Adrian came in and he sat down and he began to tell me that his family was a broken family. He did not know where his father was. And he had grown up nominally Catholic, but his family did not attend Mass regularly. And he got on to the point, he said, “I feel like I am very far from God and I don’t know how to get back.” What a joy it was to tell that young man in his own language that Jesus was right in that room as much as He was in a church someplace.

And to lead that boy in the sinner’s prayer in Spanish and to see him weep his way into the arms and the heart and the family of God. That was a great thrill. It was really wonderful. God gave us so many wonderful experiences, but… And all too soon, the Lima camp was over and it was time for me to go to the second camp. Now, CFO International, Dale Anderson, bless his heart, had told me that I was going to do a camp in the Andes. Do you know what the Andes are? Who knows what the Andes are? What are they? They’re mountains. Okay. There is a matter of fact, there’s the second highest chain of mountains in the world. Only the Himalayas in Asia, Tibet, are higher than the Andes. As a matter of fact, for information, the two highest national capitals in the world are La Paz, Bolivia, and Quito, Ecuador. Now, you may get in a trivia contest sometime and need to know that. Well, anyway, I thought I was going to go up in the nice, cool Andes mountains, you know, and pet llamas and stuff like that. And then, 48 hours before I was supposed to depart on a Friday, Dale Anderson called from California and said, “Now, Wayne, Les Ruddell from Southern California went to this, did this second camp last year or six months ago.”

I was going in March. He had been over there in October. And he said, “Why don’t you give him a call and maybe he can tell you about clothes and things like that.” So I got Les Ruddell on the telephone and I said, “Les, how thick a coat should I take?” He said, “What do you mean, coat?” I said, “Well, am I not going up in the mountains? Won’t it be cool up there?” He said, “You’re not going to the mountains. You’re going to the jungle.”

I said, “Jungle? I thought it said Andes.” He said, “No, it’s in the jungle.” He said, “Take insect repellent, wear a hat to keep from getting sunstroke.” And the more he talked, you know that, and I hung up the phone and I told Ruth, “Honey, I’m not going to the mountains. I’m going to the jungle. What am I going to do?” She said, “Let’s go shopping.”

Ruth’s solution to every potential problem is to go shopping. So we went to Rosie’s dime store and we looked around and that’s where I bought that jumpsuit. You see, she said, “Now, these will be cool and they’re one piece and, you know, and so on and so on.” And so I bought two jumpsuits. I had the blue one that I had on last night and then I had another one, a pewter kind of colored one at home. And so I went with my jumpsuits to South America and I wore them in Lima, but I didn’t wear them a single time in the jungle and I’ll tell you why in just a minute. Well, we left the Lima camp and went directly to the airport and had to fly from the Lima airport into a place called Pucallpa, which is a city in the interior. And then we spent the night at Yarinacocha, which is the Wycliffe Bible Translators headquarters there in the jungle. The next morning we got on one of these little four-passenger airplanes with Dave Arpala and there were three of us. There were six of us who were going on the CFO team into the jungle all together. Mirta Villacorte, who had played the guitar and led some of the singing in the Lima camp, was going along with us with her guitar to help with the music.

And the guide for our group was going to be Professor Teofilo Tapia, who worked for the Ministry of Education at that time. He now works for World Neighbors. So the three of us got in this little plane with our luggage with Dave, our pilot, and we took off from the surface of the lake. You know, they used these little seaplanes down there because there’s no runways in the jungle. They have to land on rivers and lakes and they always follow the river systems because that is the safest way and they have to do a lot of dog lakes to do that, but it’s much safer to fly that way than to go over these vast expanses of jungle where if there’s any engine problem, there’s no place to go down. So we rose up from the surface of that lake and saw the jungle dropping away beneath us and I promise you, it was… I never knew that there were so many different colors of green in the world and with all of that muddy rivers and lakes and everything, it looked like somebody was cooking a pot of different kinds of greens and had taken the lid off of it and when you look down through the clouds and everything, it was like steam coming out of that and all of the colored waters and everything.

Well, we flew for between two and three hours and we landed at a place called Yurimaguas and that’s where we had lunch and checked on the weather on up further north and then we had… For lunch, I had a piece of fried beef with inevitable rice, rice twice a day in Peru. I mean, that’s standard fare. The thing that makes one meal different from another is what they stew up to put on top of your rice, you understand. I got to the place, I didn’t ask them what it was that they had put on top of the rice because one day in the Lima camp something was tasting pretty good and it was very colorful and I said, “Oh, es muy sabroso,” it’s very tasty. “¿Qué es esto?” What is this? And they said, “Oh, es el estómago de una vaca, es the cow’s stomach.”

So I didn’t ask anymore. So anyway, and to drink, Professor Tapia warned us that we probably should not drink the water there so we got a hot Pepsi-Cola and that’s what we had with our lunch, but you know that you gotta have water. Pepsi will not satisfy your thirst like water will, especially if it’s hot. Well anyway, then we got back in the plane, we made one more stop on the, oh, I forgot the name of the river, but a place called Tigre Playa, and we delivered some medicines to some Norwegian missionaries and it looks so strange to see these tall, thin, blonde Norwegians ministering among these Indians and mestizos there, and then we started the last leg of our journey. We flew up to the Uropaga River and we were going to a little village called Sachapapa and after another hour, hour and a half of flying, Dave made a big circle with the airplane and I said, “Well, what are you doing?” He said, “The village is down there,” and I said, “Well, aren’t you going to land?” He said, “I can’t. The river is too shallow here, so I’m circling over so that they will know to send the canoes to get you.” Well, I was real excited about that. He went upstream about an hour and he landed on the river.

Now, the river, I suppose, was probably about as wide as this room. Maybe not quite, but I promise you it looks mighty, mighty narrow when you’re having to land on it in an airplane, you see. Well, he settled that. Those pilots are the best pilots in the world. They’ve got the best aviation record of any organization, praise God, in the world. But they pray. They’re expert pilots, but they also pray and are covered with prayer. He got that plane down and as we were coming down I looked out my window. He was here and I was here and the other two were in the back. And I looked out the window and I got my first glimpse of some Aguaruna Indian. There were about 10 or maybe 12 of them standing up on this riverbank over here. Well, the plane came down and Dave got it turned around and he started coasting back up toward the bank and they came down that bank to meet us and Dave slipped out his door and threw a rope to the man and the two teenage boys that were there and they tied it around the tree so that the current would not sweep the airplane downstream. And then they told us to get out of the plane and go on up on this little hill and they would bring our luggage for us.

Well, now I had put on my tennis shoes and I had galoshes over them because Les Ruddell had told me that when they went into the jungle before there were places they had to get out of the canoe and lift the canoe over shallow places or tree trunks or things like that in the river, and well, that’s why I had that on. Well, Mirta had on her flip-flops. We went up the hill and I don’t know what Professor Tapia had on his feet, but when the three of us got up that hill we turned around and Tomas, the Aguaruna man, had a stick, beating on the ground. Just beating it furiously. And I said, “¿Qué pasa?” What’s going on? And when he stopped he took the tip of the stick and he picked up a black snake about this long with a big diamond-shaped head. He said, “Es una víbora venenosa.” It’s a poisonous snake, he said. And he killed it right in the little grass and little bushes where all three of us had just stepped going up that hill. God had protected us miraculously from being bitten by that snake the instant we set foot in the jungle. Well, they got our luggage up there and Dave had the audacity to get back into the airplane and leave us on the riverbank.

Now, if you want some increase in prayer and faith, you try that. And there we stood with Aguaruna Indians that we had never seen before in the middle of the Peruvian jungle. And the minute the plane got into the air, it started pouring rain. So this Aguaruna family said, “Come with us and get under our, in our house.” Well, to get to their house, you had to go up another steep clay hill. Have you ever tried to climb a clay hill in the rain?

I would go one step forward and about two steps backward, you know. And I hate to have to tell you this because it’s not macho at all, but two of those Aguaruna women saw my plight. I had two suitcases and one grabbed one suitcase and one grabbed the other and do-do-do-do-do-do right on up that hill they went, leaving me to pull with trees and get up there the best way I could. We got to their house, if you can call it a house, and it consisted of six poles stuck in the ground and covered with a fat struff. There was no wall, no floor, no nothing, just a roof and some poles. We waited there for more than an hour. We tried to catch some rain water so that we could drink. We were incredibly thirsty. And so finally, one of the boys told us that the canoe had come to take us on down to the village. So we slid back down that clay hill and we got to the canoe and it was a dug-out canoe that they had literally made out of a tree trunk by chopping and burning the inside. And so naturally, the bottom side of it that was in the water was round. You understand? And so, we found out we couldn’t take all of our luggage so I had to leave one piece on the bank.

Didn’t know if I’d ever see it again or not. But I got into the canoe and Teo Balda was in the back with a paddle and Marcial, his brother, was in the front with a stick and he was going to be the navigator. And they had made a little seat there for me and I was as comfortable, I suppose, as I could be, but I had stepped in that thing and the boat went like this, you know. And I finally got settled down. All of us got in the canoe and we started away from the bank. And I looked at Marcial who was in the front and I said, “Marcial, are the piranhas?” You know what piranhas are, don’t you? I said, “Are the piranhas in este río?” “Oh, sí, hermano.” Oh, yes, yes. I said, “¿Hay cocodrilos?” Are there crocodiles too? “Oh, sí, hermano.” Well, I wasn’t overly thrilled about that news. I promise you the Venus de Milo was not any more still than I was while I was in that canoe.

And finally, I heard the Lord saying on the inside of me, with my muscles locked and my teeth clenched, you know, the Lord said, “Son, these Indians have been going up and down these rivers and canoes for centuries. I believe you can stand it for an hour or so.” So I began to relax a little bit and as we would go down the river, Marcial would holler into the jungle and some people, you wouldn’t see anybody, but the voices would come wafting back, you know. And finally, he turned around and he said, “We’ve only got about two more curves to go around and then we’ll be at the village.” And so he started calling into the jungle and he got answers back and when we came around that last curve, half the village seemed like had gathered on the bank to welcome us and the instant they saw our canoe burst into sight, they began to sing in their language. And Mirta, who was behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and she said, “They’re singing songs of welcome to the jungle.” And it was just beautiful. I didn’t understand the language, but the canoe went gliding up to that muddy river bank and some of the men came down to help us out and to get our luggage and everything.

And the whole time that they were helping us up that hill, these precious brown-skinned people with skin the color of coffee with cream in it, straight white teeth, beautiful straight black hair, high cheekbones, smiled at us and reached out to touch us and said, “Bienvenido en el nombre del Señor,” welcome in the name of the Lord. I’ve been welcomed warmly to many, many places, but I’ll never forget the welcome that I had to the village of Sachapapa in the Aguaruna territory of the Peruvian jungle. Mariano, who was in charge of arrangements for the CFO camp there in the jungle, got into the lead of our group and led us through the village down this wide, muddy street with thatched roof houses on both sides and he led us all the way through the village and up a little hill to the house that they had for their guest house. It was only one of two houses that I saw in the entire village that even had a floor in it. The other was where they stored the rice until it was time to go to market. They got us up in there and we went up about four steps and sat down on some little makeshift benches at a table that they had manufactured too.

And we were so incredibly thirsty but again, did not know if it was safe to drink the water that they had there in the village. But they had anticipated our need. Now, the first thing they brought us was some papaya. I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten papaya. I don’t care for it. It was a good thing I didn’t because I learned… Well, how shall I say it? I’ll say it this way. If you ever run out of milk or magnesium and have a problem, eat some papaya. Okay?

So, anyway, they brought us some papaya and I gave mine away. But then, they knew that we would be thirsty so they brought us some water that they had put in a kettle, some river water, and had boiled it so it would be safe for us to drink. And they took it off the fire and brought it to us boiling hot and that was what we had to quench our thirst with when we first got into the jungle. Then they brought a supper which was plátano, which is bananas that they picked green and these they had roasted. They were baked, you see. And sometimes they slice it and fry it and sometimes they just chop it all up and boil it in water until it comes all the pieces and the juice of the bananas sweetens the water and they called this drink chapo and it’s the most typical drink that they have. But they also gave us a mucca, the bread of the jungle, and then they had a fish called the bocachica, smallmouth, that they caught in the river in front of the village and it was a very tasty fish, but it was so full of bones I’ve never eaten a fish that had any more bones than that one did. And they had cooked that fish with the head still on it and it’s just not too tasty trying to eat something that’s watching you, you understand.

So we had a good supper and then the elders gathered around and we talked for a few minutes, our luggage finally did arrive, and then they started fixing our little beds. Now Professor Tapia had bought some little rolls of foam rubber to put underneath us to make it a little bit more comfortable and they put mosquito netting over us and so we got everything ready and we’re going on to bed. And so we find ourselves going to bed about nine o’clock. Now Mariano told me that their village was really growing and I said to him later on, I said, “I reckon your village is growing if everybody goes to bed at nine o’clock and there’s no TV.” You know. Well anyhow, the next morning we woke up very, very early with the roosters and the dogs and everything, all the noise of the jungle life and the birds calling, and Professor Tapia said, “Come with me.” I said, “Where are we going?” He said, “I will show you the latrina.” We’re going to the latrine. Well I mean, isn’t that what you have to do first thing in the morning too? So, he led me out to the edge of this village and there was a little building there that was thatched on three sides and the open side was facing into the jungle away from the village and we went on this little path around in front of this little hut like here and he said, “Here it is.”

And I looked and there were two wooden discs about this big with a stick sticking up in the middle and they were side by side about like this. He said, “Here it is.” And I said, “Here’s what? I don’t know.” And then he took hold of one of the sticks and he lifted that disc up and there was a hole there. Now, no seat, you understand. Just a hole in the ground. And he handed me some paper and saints, I was on my own. You understand?

Now you know why I never wore my jumpsuits in the jungle. You would say. Well, that afternoon I decided I’d better take a bath. And I said, “Well, where can I take a bath?” And they said, “In the river down here.” I said, “But what about the piranhas and everything?” And they said, “Well, we’ve never been bitten or anything.” So I decided and I went down there and everybody else was in the river. They would wash with their clothes on except the little boys now. I never saw a little boy under about nine or ten years old that had any clothes on except one. I mean, the little girls, the instant they were born, they put clothes on them. But all of the little boys went just as naked as a yard doll until they were about ten years old. The only little boy that age I saw with any clothes on and all had a pair of boots.

So here I go that afternoon now and I put on my bathing suit and I get my towel over my shoulder and I got my Ivory soap and my shampoo and here I go down to the river and there’s about a half a dozen little boys over there, you know, little naked boys over there splashing and washing and swimming and everything. And here comes this fat, white, hairy gringo, you know. And the first thing I’m going to do is wash my hair in this muddy river.

Well, I bent over and got my head wet, you know, and then I started lathering up and those boys went into hysterics. I’m wrong. And so I got my head washed and then I went out and got my Ivory soap and it was one of these little bars and I was lathering up and they were just watching and laughing and my soap broke all the pieces so after I got lathered up, I gave them the pieces of it and they started lathering up and enjoying that. It was, for the first time in their lives, no doubt, you know. And then I was over there just washing and swimming, you know, and just having a good time and all of a sudden it occurred to me that I wondered if part of the problem was that I wondered if piranhas could be nearsighted and how much easier it would have been to see my legs than it would these natives’ legs.

And about that time a very innocent little stick washed downstream and hit me on my hip. Well, it disordered my mind there for a season. But I did get my bath. The rest of the team arrived that afternoon and we got camp started and it was so beautiful and maybe I’ll get to tell you more about the camp there in the jungle. But I’ve got to tell you at least one of the things that God taught me while I was there. Now, I told you a little bit about the food in the Lima camp. Well, the food in the jungle was really quite interesting.

In addition to the things that I’ve already told you about, we did have a boiled egg occasionally and sometimes we would have a ripe banana and they did give us a pineapple one time and there were lemons and we would squeeze lemon juice into our water because it seemed like that lemon juice would help take the edge off your thirst. Well, about the third day I was there. It was the hottest day seemingly that we had had. The temperature soared. Professor Tapia heard on his shortwave radio that in Quito, which is the capital of Ecuador, way up in the Andes, that the temperature in Quito was 36 degrees centigrade, which computes to somewhere around 100 Fahrenheit, and that was in the mountains. We had no idea how high the temperature went down in that Amazon basin of the headwaters at least. And it was so hot that it had been raining, it was just steamy. And by that time people had asked me how did all of these foods taste? All I know to tell you is that everything they cooked, any meat or anything like that, they would boil with rice and river water. And it got to the place that everything took on that musty flat awful taste of the water of that river.

And that third day, which was so hot, I just found myself recoiling. Everything in me was just reacting and I was just wanting to get out of there and I was wondering if there was any way that we could contact Wycliffe headquarters to get a plane to come and get me. Everything in me was just crying out, “I just can’t take it anymore.” And I was really feeling guilty, I felt like a washout as a missionary and, you know, the whole nine yards, and to make matters worse, the afternoon before I had walked past the little kitchen where Andres, the men do the cooking down there, Andres and his staff had some things roasting on the open fire and they had a couple of logs and one thing they had killed a bird that morning and were roasting the bird with the head still on it, but the thing that was beside it was really what caught my attention. They had killed an armadillo and they had gotten the intestines and all of that out and had turned the armadillo upside down and were roasting the flesh of the armadillo in the shell. They had a towel over the live coals, and the next morning on this day, they had hollowed the meat out from the armadillo shell, had stewed it up with rice and river water, and we were having armadillo stew for lunch.

And as a guest, they gave me a hunk of the meat. A good-sized hunk. I sat there, and after we had our blessing, I looked at that piece of meat swimming in that dark rice soup, and I pulled part of it apart with the spoon that they gave to me, and put it in my mouth and began to chew on the meat. And it seemed like the more I chewed, the bigger it got.

And I knew I was in trouble. I promise you, brothers and sisters, I sat there and prayed as hard as I have ever prayed over anything in my life, that God would not let me throw up. If I had not been able to eat the best that they could offer me, how could I be credible to minister? I sat there, and I prayed, and I prayed, and I ate every bit of that stew and kept it down. But I knew I had to get with God. And that afternoon, right after lunch, I just excused myself. I just went, and I got before the Lord. And I said, “Lord, You’re going to have to do something in me. Everything in me wants to get out of this.” And, you know, my idea of roughing it, saints, is a Holiday Inn that only has black and white TV. You understand? And there I was in the most incredible thing, in heat that was just baking me. I lost seven pounds that week I was in the jungle without trying to. And I ate all the meals, all the meals every day.

And finally, the grace of God broke in and said, “Wayne, I have not brought you here to put another feather in your spiritual cap. I have brought you here to minister to some of My choice people who have practically no opportunities.

I have brought you here to love and to serve these people. And My son, you don’t have to be comfortable. But you are required to be obedient.” And deep within me, something gladly… It still wasn’t easy. But something said, “Yes, sir.”

And the scripture came, “My grace is sufficient.” And after God’s love broke through to my head and my heart, I was okay. But I had to go through the Gethsemane factor. You understand? Jesus went into Gethsemane and He said, “Father, if it’s possible, let this cup pass from Me.”

But the Father said, “It’s not possible. You have to go through Your Gethsemane and You have to go through Your Calvary.” And you know, I really believe that once Jesus got past Gethsemane, Calvary was still agony. But it was okay. You understand what I’m saying to you? You have to get to the place where in your heart of hearts, you are willing for whatever comes. And God’s taught me to call that the Gethsemane factor. And brothers and sisters, all of us, time and time again in various areas of our lives, are going to have to walk through a Gethsemane experience in order to do what God wants us to do. And I had a Gethsemane experience there in the jungle.

The conditions didn’t get a bit better, I mean. If you think armadillo stew was bad, the next day we had monkey stew. That afternoon, somebody came running past the porch of our house with three monkeys that they had killed hanging on a rope. And if you think three dead monkeys with hair on them are ugly, you ought to see them after they’ve skinned them. And they went and cooked it. And the next day we had monkey stew. And I am absolutely convinced that they gave me a monkey’s paw because it was so full of gristle. But I got it, don’t I?

We had a demon-possessed man to come into the village who was so powerful that he had to be held down in the mud by eight men for the deliverance to be administered to him. And he writhed and hissed like a snake and spit on us.

And we spent one of the most horrendous nights of my life in an Aguaruna hut with one candle and a weak flashlight. And sometimes he blew out the candle. Hissing. It was horrible. The conditions didn’t get any better, but I could take it. Not because of anything in me, but because in great love God had brought me through Gethsemane for this particular experience. And had taught me, you don’t have to be comfortable, but you do have to be obedient.

Let’s pray. Lord, particularly here in America where we have so many blessings, we think of luxuries as necessities. And Lord, we have to confess to You that more often we move on the basis of convenience than we do on the basis of conviction. Forgive us, Lord.

Help us, Lord, to choose the way of Calvary love. And help us to know deep in our spirits that when You call us into those Gethsemanes and into those Calvaries where a part of us dies, that there’s always a resurrection to follow, that death.

And that Your grace indeed is sufficient to help us to walk in obedience even when we are uncomfortable. Let it be so in every life here. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.