"Do you understand what you are reading?"

And he said, "How can I, unless some guides me? - Acts 8:30-31

I'll call him Enrique. My encounter with him I will never forget. 

We planned a Sunday afternoon meeting at a school near Chincay Alto in the Huaylas Valley of Peru. As is often the case, someone dropped the ball, and the caretaker never arrived to let us in. We had small toys, school supplies, and boxes of the newly printed and first-ever Quechua Translation New Testaments translated by Wycliff specifically for that region. Our plans didn’t work out, but God had other plans. 

We were determined not to waste the afternoon, so we divided up into groups of two and three and took as many New Testaments as we could carry to distribute to the small homes. Most of the homes were adobe with tin roofs, very humble to say the least. The people are subsistence farmers growing such crops as can stand the altitude of about 11,000 ft as well as keeping sheep and goats. One group went this way, and one went that way to put a New Testament in as many homes as possible. 

My group of three was down to our last New Testament. There was a tin-roofed hut on the top of a knoll that was just calling to us, it seemed, so we struggled to get up the hill. I knocked on the gate of the corral, and a young girl came out, looked at me, and ran back inside. An elderly man came out and walked up, and while I was saying hello, he was looking at the Quechua New Testament I had in my hand. He just turned around, went back to his house, and returned with a copy of the very same New Testament. He held it out to me and said (in Spanish), I bought one of those down in Huaraz a few weeks ago. I was looking at his copy; it had quite a few paper markers in it and was obviously being used. He looked at me and said, “Where have you been? How am I supposed to know what this is talking about if somebody doesn’t explain it to me?” Where have you been? He asked. 

“How can I (understand) unless someone guides me?” Friends, pastors, missionaries, prayer teams, and financial supporters Enrique represents billions that need someone to help them understand. That’s why we do this. The call to learn and grow, send and go is bound up in God’s heart for the one’s waiting to hear. Let’s keep going.