Brazil 4- 13

As in completely normal here, just finished eating pizza at almost midnight. This pizza had a very thin crust, very little cheese. One half had slices of tomato, the other had a filling that could have been spinach. This was washed down with a juce called acerola. I don't think there is a US equivalent. One custom here is to put mayo, ketchup or mustard rather liberally on top of the pizza. For the past two days have been at a conference of Christian businesspeople. Most are of Brazil although another half dozen countries are represented. There are have a number of speakers, various videos, and a choice of workshops to attend. Suprisingly the food has not been up to the normal Brazilian standard. There are over two hundred participants. Perhaps the conference center was expecting less. Highlights include praying for Vinci prior to his preaching Friday night. This morning had a very good workshop about investing in the kingdom. The speaker had seven barriers to investing. Some of these were the difference between philantrophy and investing, fatalism (won,t do any good anyway), lack of trust in potential recipients. The speaker was clear and paused enough for me to get the gist. Unfortunately in another workshop the speaker gave two minutes to his stated topic and two hours to something completely unrelated. Another nice opportunity was having fellowship with three young men who did not speak English. All of my Portuguese study is paying some dividends. Spoke with another non English speaking young man at dinner. While there are some standard questions- where do you live, what do you do for work, tell us about your family- which i have answered at least a hundred times, we were able to branch out beyond those topics. the most striking thing about the conference was given by a middle aged man whom i had heard about. He has memorized the entire NT in Portugese, along with portions of the OT. The Bible has about 33,000 verses, roughly equivalent to an English sentence. The NT alone has 8,000. This is an amazing feat. In the morning he gave a dramatic performance of David and Goliath, incorporating almost fifty verses of 1 Samuel 17. I followed along in the same Portuguese version. I think he skipped one word, and transposed two others. Otherwise he was word perfect.