Blessings of Late

First, praise the Lord, there is light!  We have lights up at our building and they look fantastic!  We have been running all over the place trying to get everything together for the launch of “O Caminho” on March 7th! It has been crazy not lately so our errands have been pretty tiring.  But, it is such a blessing to see the progress.  Here I am in front of the lights store making the lights purchase (and sweating )!  And, below is Wes in the building with the new lights installed!  

Wes with the lights and giving a shout out to our home state.

This weekend after our big week of purchases and errands for the building we decided to go out for a date.  We hopped on bus 31 right in front of our building and headed to the mall.  We were planning to go to the mall and walk around a little in the fantastic air conditioning and then have dinner.  We got off the bus and walked a little ways when Wes started feeling for his wallet–he couldn’t find it and realized it must have fallen out of his front pocket on the bus.  We ran back to the bus and asked if they had any way to contact the bus we had just left.  Being Rio, they did not so we hopped on the next bus 31 and rode it to the end of the line where we spoke with the manager of the bus line.  We gave him our phone numbers and asked if he would call if anyone found it.  We returned home for Wes to call and cancel our credit card and I stayed in front of our apartment and stopped every bus 31 that passed to ask if they had found a lost wallet.  Several of the bus drivers sort of laughed when I asked them and gave me a “boa sorte” (good luck).  We were thankful that Wes had no money in it, but we were just so disappointed thinking about having to re-do his documents here and even his driver’s license from home–plus trying to receive his credit and debit cards!  We felt like it was probably gone for good but I just kept asking the Lord to allow it to get in the hands of someone honest who would try to get it back to us.  We had a nice day Sunday worshipping at Santa Barbara and then getting together with our team for a football game in the evening.  Then Monday we spent half of our language class talking with Charbelle about how to replace Wes’ documents.  I went out to run errands Monday afternoon and Wes called saying a lady had called to say her son had found the wallet on the bus!  She had tracked us down from a couple of phone numbers that were in Wes’ wallet!  Wes went and met her husband and he gave back the wallet saying that he found it with no money in it and he was so sorry if money was taken!  Wes wanted to give him a little money to thank him for getting it back to us and blessing our week so much!  He said he was a man of God and couldn’t accept any money, but after Wes encouraged him to use it to help his family or to help someone in need, he finally agreed and said the money would be used to help someone in the name of the Lord.  Praise God for His people who are still so prevalent in this world!  We were both so blessed by seeing God’s hand in this.