Paying the Price…Again 

Amazonian Wednesdays 🌴

 

I wrote this piece twenty years ago this month. The Lord did indeed provide all that was needed. Our Christian school, San Marcos, is serving underprivileged families today, and has been for most of these last two decades. How amazingly faithful is our God!

November 2004
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“There is trouble in Iquitos,” Israel shared with me last night. “You know that piece of land we bought two years ago? Well, somebody showed up from Lima with a title deed to it. The document of purchase the seller had given us was not a legitimate one. There is nothing we can do but buy it all over again, as we are not the legal owners!” 

The lady that sold us this piece of land had been a neighbor of the church for twenty-four years, as long as the church has been there. Even though she had not had the usual paperwork available for us (i.e., an official title deed), we had trusted her word because she had been our neighbor for so long. We thought she did not have a title deed because she had been too poor to register her land with the government, which costs money. We were planning on registering the land, but we never had been able to fit it into our budget either. 

Now, two years later, the real owner showed up. Apparently the lady who sold it to us, who had been there pretty much since the neighborhood had been built, had just been squatting all those years. As the owner had not been around in close to forty years, this squatter thought that the owner would never turn up. After the squatting neighbor “sold” us the land, she disappeared into the depths of the jungle. 

We “bought” this piece of land for $5,000 U.S. dollars. It has close to 6,000 square feet, and we had been believing that God would provide the means to build a Christian elementary school on it. Now that the real owner has come into the picture, she wants to sell it too. Unfortunately, there is a cult group that wants to buy it from her and set up shop right across from our church. And they are not the only ones. There are other organizations in our area also have heard that it is for sale and want to introduce some competition to the block. And if that is not enough, a beer distributor company is also interested! All of them have the money to buy the land up front. 

We will not let the enemy have his way with this land! The owner, knowing that

we already paid for it once, out of a sense of compassion, is willing to sell it to us provided we can pay for it. She was wanting $20,000 USD for it, but she has agreed to sell it to us for $10,000. We have to have $1,000 of it to her by this month for her to sign a purchase contract with us (there is a real title deed involved this time!). Even that much is a tremendous faith challenge for our congregation, many of whom do not make much more than that in a year! 

God has done tremendous things in our church this year, bringing much growth, many new souls, and many physical blessings. We are determined not to let the enemy steal our joy over what He is doing through this circumstance. We believe that God will give us this land back, which the enemy has attempted to steal. 

We are unsure how much time we will have to get the money together, as the owner has heard gossip that we are a rich church (amen—we receive that!!) and wants us to pay the whole purchase price almost immediately. We eagerly wait on our God…