The Lord led Paulo Roberto to our ministry to the homeless back in 2015. In the beginning, like many of our volunteers Paulo showed up on Sundays and helped with our Sunday service in the park, singing, handing out Bible tracts, helping serve breakfast after worship.
With time Paulo showed an eagerness to do more, voluntarily taking on more and more of the tasks essential to our ministry to those living on the streets of Recife. After a year or so he agreed to help teach some of the Sunday lessons. He created a messaging group to stay in touch with all the other volunteers, and was adept at bringing more and more volunteers to the ministry.
Today Paulo manages all the logistics of getting the main elements of our Sunday breakfast for our homeless friends. Most Sundays other volunteers bring the sandwiches, cuscuz, soft drinks and disposable cups and spoons. But somebody has to make sure every Sunday those commitments are in place. And Paulo does that.
Paulo also now leads the ministry when I have to travel, preparing and teaching the Sunday lessons, and making sure every Sunday there’s a worship service and healthy breakfast for the 150-200 homeless men and women we serve in Derby Park.
With Paulo’s help today we have over twenty brothers and sisters in Christ serving in shifts so each Sunday there are enough volunteers to teach the adults and the children (yes we have a children’s Sunday school in the park), and serve a healthy breakfast to these sons and daughters of the King.
All of this has not gone unnoticed by the single moms from Joana Bezerra. Last August, when it was Paulo’s birthday they organized a party complete with not one but two cakes, snacks, soft drinks, presents, and a huge banner with Bible verses calling forth blessings on Paulo Roberto.
And in the big reveal several of the moms and their children read Bible verses declaring blessings over Paulo and his family. And all of this was those single mom’s idea. They didn’t need me to choose the verses or even have the idea to make Paulo’s birthday into a moment to declare blessings from God’s word on his life. It was their idea. Theirs. All theirs.
Whether you’re an elder, pastor, preacher, Sunday School teacher, I think one of the dreams of all who accept the call to teach and “lead” others, one of our dreams, and maybe the source of our greatest doubt is, “Are they really owning this?” “Is anything changing in them?”
These single mothers, with all their struggles with poverty, raising one or two or a half dozen children on their own, trying to make ends meet, pay bills, pay rent, keep their kids in school, and out of the drug trade, and all the myriad of other challenges they face, still heard God’s word speaking to them, and chose to speak back blessings on another they saw as honoring Him.
In the video Raiane was suffering from an acute abdominal pain and shortly after that I had to take her to an emergency clinic. But Raine wouldn’t think of missing the chance to bless Paulo. And blessed he was with with the verses on the banner from Psalm 91:14, Numbers 6:24-26, Ecclesiastes 11:9, and others these ladies declared over him.
It’s been close to a year since we’ve had any baptisms or other clear signs of “conversion” to report. And I’m more aware than you might imagine how few and far between those clear signs are. But I invite you to join me in looking more closely at the less obvious signs of change and transformation I believe Jesus is making in the lives of these ladies and their children.
I praise the Lord for these simple signs of faith we see here.
And I thank Him for you and your prayers.
Honoring those who honor the Lord