I just wanted to post an update on my crippled friend who I wrote about on the 23rd August as I have heard that some of you are praying for him. Firstly, he was and is real. He is 32 years old and lives close to The Lighthouse (casa Luzeiro). Maarten (the guy I work with) and I talked to the Discipleship Training School students about him as if he were imaginary and asked them what they would do, in a similar way to the post on 23rd August and they came back to us with some ideas so we then challenged them to go and do what they said they would do. How it ended up was a bit like this: The students went to his house and ended up talking with his entire family - mother, sisters, nieces etc - and prayed for them too but only one of the students stayed and talked with this guy. Maybe the others did not know what to do or maybe they thought that talking with the family was better. I do not know.
When he greets Maarten and I he gives us a BIG hug. He has very strong arms! We plan on taking him to a church soon, although it may still be a couple of months before we actually do that but we´ll see. We talk with him and continue to pray with him too and we have seen small changes in him already, as if he has some hope now. On a practical note, we are in the process of getting him into a literacy class in a local school as he would love to be able to read and write. The other things I wrote about previously remain the same for the moment but we expect a change in his circumstances soon.