Post 17 The proverbial pot of gold

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Tall yarns and big ideas were very common in conversation, especially if there could be any faint possibility of collaboration in gaining the proverbial pot of gold.  

One chap had a talk with Jim about radar equipment to locate gold in an old Jesuit farm out from San Ramon. He claimed to have the map and details of buried treasure there, saying that in the early days, four Jesuit priests with forty mule loads and 120 Indians all loaded with gold went to San Ramon where they buried the treasure in the plot of ground. 

According to his story, the four priests poisoned all the forest natives afterwards, and travelled down the Mamore River, where at the junction of the Mamore and the Itenez Rivers their boat sank in a whirlpool with only one man escaping. The priest who escaped, had asked the father of the storyteller, a German, to translate the Latin directions on the map. In this way his father was supposed to have copied the chart. 

Another young chap wanted Jim to accompany him on a canoe trip (paddling, of course) up the Itenez River to Cafetal. He said he was going there to dig gold in order to get money for an eye operation for cataracts. His idea was that each would be company for the other, while Jim could preach to the people there who never hear the Gospel. 

The offer sounded a good one in some respects, but we had no desire to mix the testimony of the Gospel with goldmining and its accompanying greed, fighting and even murder. We had certainly heard of a gold mine in the area and of some uncontacted tribes who lived in the forest nearby.  

Also, without doubt there were many needy places along the border of Brazil where the word of God was never heard, so we prayed that the Lord would provide a small motor for a canoe in order that time could be spent in evangelising from place to place along the rivers.

Encouragement in the Work

When the times seemed hard-going spiritually in the work, the Lord gave us encouragement in varied ways.  At the end of January we had a visit from a fine old believer from Magdalena. 

He looked like an old Aussie farmer! It was such a pleasure to have him there, full of the joy of the Lord and of His Salvation, helping in some of the meetings. His main theme of conversation was that believers must be ready to suffer for the Lord, and he told of the persecution in Magdalena over the stolen custodia (container for the consecrated communion bread) of the Catholic Church, for which the believers were blamed on the evidence of a witch doctor.

About mid-February at our Sunday evening indoor service there were only a few folk present, but we were encouraged in having with us a boy from about 25 miles out in the country.  This lad of 17 had bought a Bible during one of our open-air meetings three months previously, and he had almost finished reading the New Testament.

Country people, when they could read, were far from fluent, but he was reading the verses quite fluently, so we had every reason to believe that he really was almost through the New Testament. It was always the custom to read aloud, and so others also had heard the Gospel.  

In prayer-time at the close of the meeting, he prayed and thanked the Lord that he had been able to give his life to the Saviour.  He left at dawn the next day for this ranch, but promised to return and see us. It was an encouragement to us to press on.

By the end of March, the Sunday evening meetings were becoming a fairly steady group of about 15, and we were praying that there might be some clear-cut Christian disciples. Don Alegario seemed to be standing firm in his Christian testimony, but Don Ambrosio the carpenter still had not returned to the meetings, although he affirmed he was still reading his Bible and following the Lord. The open-air meetings were also attracting attention and spreading the Word to all parts of the town.