September 6, 2005
Blessed
Dear Friends,
Today we have invited new friends here to a blessing of our home
and our work in Bolivia. The traditional peach drink, the fruit
salad, the potatoes, pork, and chicken are ready. As is the custom,
a portion of one’s drink will be poured out upon the earth
in gratitude and in recognition of God’s creation. Candles
will be lit to represent God’s light and will be shared,
as is expressed here. Incense will be lit to represent our prayers
lifted up to God. Many are bringing musical instruments. The sound
of the Andean pan pipes and quena flutes will sound out our joy
in being here, our joy of working with these wonderful souls to
restore a bit of God’s kin-dom to this magnificent land.
I will make a fire circle of rock I found yesterday, and I imagine
we will be gathered in song and fellowship late into the night,
sitting in prayer, council, and song.
We are blessed, and we invite you to join us in our prayers of
dedication. We are offering our home for future meetings, gatherings,
and retreats for the organizations and churches with whom we are
linked here. The first will be a gathering of Presbyterian youth.
Julie and I have been on three trips: to Oruro, Potosi, and Cochabamba.
Next week we will travel to Santa Cruz. We have visited the Joining
Hands for Life Network (UMAVIDA) organizations, their work in
the marginalized communities, helped lift llamas into a pickup,
dedicated water projects, participated in the first Bolivian conference
of the International Network in Defense of the Right to Water
with a presidential candidate and a university philosophy professor
in the Ethical and Spiritual Workshop of UMAVIDA.
We have visited the areas impacted by the mining corporations,
which continue to devastate the land, leaving only poverty and
slow death. We have participated in many workshops and conferences
to stop and/or modify the “free” trade agreements,
the selling of the nation’s sovereignty to international
corporate boardrooms. We have been with thousands giving their
input on how the Constitutional Assembly should be carried out.
We have traveled to the ancestral ruins and the ancient pathways,
to the top of volcanic cones and high-mountain passes where the
Milky Way is so clear we have observed the spiral arms of our
galaxy and the southern Magellanic Clouds, galaxies outside our
own.
And we are just beginning this most amazing journey with a land
full of hope and expectations of establishing a truly participative
democracy in control of its own resources and hoping to maintain
its lands free from deadly chemicals and genetic controls, seeking
to restore God’s Creation.
We invite you to join us, to work to influence those who make
the big decisions to remember the people, to influence those who
build weapons of mass destruction to lay down their arms, to influence
those addicted to petroproducts to recognize the destructive nature
of their addiction, to admit their helplessness before God and
seek together mutual salvation.
In God’s Name,
Bob
The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
60 |
