All for 20 mil

Around eleven o’clock last night Pete and I were sound asleep when I started hearing Lady, the dog, barking. The cows, which moo all night, were getting louder and louder and this set off the roosters crowing. I thought great …Intruder, the cow who breaks into the yard all the time, was back with a bunch of friends. I was really confused and had visions that the house was besieged by cows and chickens when I started to hear a woman wailing from far off. Amy urgently called “Pete it’s an emergency.” Pete jumped out of bed and ran out into the street. I followed him and looked out the door. There were two cars and about twenty people milling around. The women were crying and falling on the ground and the men just stood around in clusters. Pete was running back and forth from the road to the mobile clinic bringing Jeff equipment. Amy was consoling the women and bringing them blankets. She told me that the man who Pete and Jeff where working on had been shot in the head. He was barely breathing when they brought him. Jeff was trying to help the man breath by giving him a tracheostomy to maintain his airway. Amy said that the capillaries had already burst in one eye and the other pupil was fixed. I watched Pete running back and forth numerous times over the next twenty-five minutes until the women started to wail violently. I knew immediately that they had told them that the man had died. I just kept praying for the wife who I could see wrapped up in a blanket next to the car, asking God to comfort her. I really couldn’t do anything else. I thought that if my husband had been shot I would want someone praying for us ceaselessly during the crisis. How awful to watch your husband die in the back of an SUV covered in blood and gasping for air.
Then a member of the national police force wearing a bullet proof vest asked Jeff to write down what he had done and saw. Apparently, the man who had been shot was the husband of the school’s principal. He was the son-in-law of the richest and most politically connected man in town. Everyone here is related to one another. The murderer apparently called the man and told him to meet him outside his house. When he came outside he shot him. The man’s daughter saw her father get shot from inside her bedroom. Jeff said he had heard four gunshots a few minutes before all the people arrived. The shooter left his motorcycle at the man’s house and fled into the woods. Amy said the man’s family will probably kill him if they find him before the police.
This all would have been heart wrenching except for what God had showed me that very morning at church. I would have thought before, oh how awful to lose someone with no assurance of their salvation. Most Paraguayans believe that after someone dies you have to spend nine days in prayer praying them out of Purgatory. How wretched to think that I am responsible for someone else’s eternal destiny. But that very morning under a patch of trees in a grassy field I watched a group of believers sing praises to Jesus in a language I didn’t know and heard every word with my heart. I saw that God was the God of the whole earth and not just my little life. He had grown up a church of new believers, people who didn’t even know him a few years before. And there they were right before my eyes singing of Christ’s saving grace with smiles on their faces. They openly confessed their sins, asked for prayer, worshipped, and shared their personal walks with Christ. Who am I to know what will come of this death. Perhaps He is using it to bring more San Franciscans into a personal relationship with Him. “What can was away my sin….nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can make me whole again….nothing but the blood of Jesus.”