January 2006

Dear Brethren,

Toward the latter part of January I made a visit to our work at Porto Walter. One of our missionaries, Brother Hudson, and one other member, Eliseu, went with me. The town is a little over three hours up the Juruá River. We went in my homebuilt aluminum boat with 60HP engine that you have provided through your offerings.

Our missionary in Porto Walter is Mário and has been there for over ten years now. Lately things have been a little slow, so I have had to visit them and help figure out what is and is not working. This trip was to do our annual evaluation. Things were much better than my last visit, but certainly not what they should be.

There were a couple of professions of faith, pretty good crowds (about 100 in each service) and I baptized four more. One young couple that I baptized had just been saved a few months and just got married. He is already leading singing and she is helping teach the children and women. They have a lot of potential.

Each night I stayed up with Mário and his wife until past two in the morning and one whole afternoon teaching them, going over past instructions to see what had been accomplished and making out the next plans for the coming months. I set up an emergency three month plan for them to straighten out some things and repair some damage that his wife has caused in the town in the last few years. She is a tough one! Then we set up the general plan for the work for the rest of this year. I let the guys who went with me sit in on most of these talks so they could learn, too. Hopefully they will be able to apply the principles to their lives and pass them on to other workers as well.

About every three weeks I have been in touch with Mário to check up and hold him accountable for the different tasks I left him to do. We talked again this past week. Attendance is up over 50%. About 90% of the people that his wife drove away have come back into fellowship (I really did have to get tough with her!). There have been people saved almost every week. They have also made a couple more mission trips further up river. They have been to Vitória , Reforma and Campo de Santana. Mário won a couple more people to Christ just last week. All the services have been much more Spirit filled.

One bad result from those late night talks was another case of malaria for me. Exactly three weeks after that trip I was on my back again with falciparum malaria. Thank God I recognized the symptoms early, got a blood test and medication after just two days of illness and was recovering pretty quickly. I preached on a Sunday night at First Baptist and only the Lord and I knew what I was feeling. There were three or four people saved that night. As soon as the service was over I was stretched out on a pew. I wasn’t even able to go back to the door to dismiss the crowd. By Friday that same week I was pretty well on my way to recovery.

Please pray for me. I have had a string of illnesses and accidents. At the same time, it is not uncommon for me to work 17 or 18 hour days. I need to get better organized and disciplined. Recently my oldest son complained that I had not asked about the flooding in Napa Valley, California. At that time I had been about three weeks that I had not seen any news at all, so I didn’t even know that there had been a flood anywhere in the world!

It has now been five years since my last furlough. We really need to get around and see you guys, but it doesn’t look good for this year. Pray with us please. Thanks that you do continue to pray and support us even though we are so far away. God bless you.

In Christ,

Mike Creiglow