Brazil 4:25

Saturday night went to a worship service in which two churches combined. The one normally uses a school, which was unavailable. Some phone calls arranged for the joint meeting. The one church had asked me to speak; the other also had an out of town preacher. I am no expert at estimating crowds but I guess there were about three hundred. My host had arranged translators for me, one visible and two sitting in the front row to assist. I attempted several jokes at the beginning; these did not work. I did share on the theme of persecution, using a number of verses such as Matthew 5:10-12, Matthew 10:22, John 15:18-20, 2 Timothy 3:12, 1 Peter 4:12-16, Romans 13:1-3, and Acts 5:27-29 & 40-41. The second preacher is a famous Christian musician in Brazil named Daniel Souza. I have a couple of his songs on a compilation CD. He is a very fervent brother. After the meeting several younger people spoke with me. One was a man of late twenties who said he felt isolated because when he spoke about persecution no one listened. The other was a youth of fifteen who asked me about the USA. His impression, gained from TV and movies, was that the US was a perfect country; everyone had lots of Money, and life was good. I had to tell him that none of these things are true. The rainy season has begun here, and I went in a downpour to a pizza place which uses the motif of Sponge Bob square pants to serve square shaped pizzas. My friends were five young married couples and a new convert. Eventually there were four separate pizzas served including a dessert pizza with chocolate and strawberries. The next day went to the home of one of these couples for an all afternoon barbecue. They have three dogs and a swimming pool. Brazilians serve many kinds of meat at a BBQ including sausage, chicken, and various cuts of beef. The beef is treated with large granules of salt. On the way to the BBQ we stopped at a supermarket. I was with four friends, manning the shopping cart, while they discussed the purchases when a girl of maybe eight or nine came up and asked me a question. I did not understand her. She had mayo, rice, salt and sugar in her arms. She repeated the question slowly. I still did not understand so i asked her to speak to one of my friends. They spoke and then she put the items in our shopping cart and departed. My friend explained that often times very poor people will ask others to pay for a few items in this manner. However the female manager of the store had a different perspective. She said that drug dealers recruited children to do this. When the children received the items paid for, then they would be resold for money to buy drugs. She repeated this over and over to every member of the party. I left this up to my friends. The reality of Brazil is that first and third worlds live very close together.