Fellowship

This past weekend we were very blessed by the Lord to be able to visit our dear friends, the Murphys. We had some amazing time of fellowship but in addition to that we were also given the opportunity to minister to other people.
 Well, the main reason that this became a post entry is because we honestly learnt so much from them. It was a blessing to hear them telling us stories on how the Lord has done so many things over the years that they have been living in Ireland and other countries. We heard some interesting stories of Bible smugglers to Russia, Chinese Christianity and so on.
We thank the Lord for so much freedom of religion we have in this country, and even back in Brazil where you can freely exercise your faith, and also proclaim it:  there is no restrictions about open street evangelism, handing out tracts, literature and so on.
We  realised that we do very little to engage into conversations and even be friendly to people having as our primary objective the good of their souls and consequently the Glory of God.

One of the interesting stories was about the underground Christian Church in China. Mr. Murphy was describing a trip a few years ago and how hard it is for Christians in some parts of that country to even open a public place of worship. He described the Christians he met were so eager to share the gospel that in a 15 minute taxi run they would talk about the Lord Jesus and at the end give the taxi driver a gospel tract.


Murphys, Roques and
 brother Geoffrey

 He also told us about a Russian pastor that used to smuggle Bibles into Russia, and it was so hard to get it there that they had to send single chapters of the Bible as letters from different addresses.
I also recall him mentioning something about memorising Bible verses. I took a great interest in that as I recently learn the importance of not only read the Scriptures but also to meditate "day and night " in what I read. He briefly mentioned that his mother has around 500 hundred verses memorised. To me, it sounded  more than what I could possibly do in twenty years time.
Anyway, after a blessed dinner we went to an Alzheimer centre, intending to sing " christmas carols ". This is the place where Mr. Murphy's father stayed briefly before he departed to be with our Lord. See, God works mightily and because of his brief stay there and the testimony of a godly life at his funeral service, doors were open to that place.
We sang and after that we had an opportunity to talk to some of the elderly people in there. This time it was very interesting! I am usually very " slow" to enter into gospel conversation, but after realising that we do not even need to ask questions like : Do you believe in the existence of God? ( of course everyone does), or try to find a way to get to the point; it was a very straight forward talk with many of them. 
It was rather encouraging also because for the first time I could see , through the conversations, that it is more natural to have thoughts concerning God than not to have them.
 At last I got the opportunity to ask Mr. Murphy's mother about memorising Scriptures: She has 782 verses memorised and she goes through a 100 everyday. She couldn't stress more the importance of memorising  Scriptures and also told us that it was a great help when she went through the process of her husband's sickness. She  said it was a comfort to her that the Lord would direct her thoughts to the verses she had memorised (like: "God is my refuge and strength; a very present help in trouble. Psalm 46:1)