Things you can find on an outing

Our family really enjoys getting out of the house. We love to go on walks in the neighborhood. We have a couple of parks near our house where Elisa likes to play. It is a good way for us to stay connected with each other and take in our surrounds here in Brazil.

There are times, though, when our surroundings are laced with darkness. You can read a lot in the Bible, primarily in the Old Testament, about sacrifices to false gods. We see a lot of sacrifices here in our neighborhood and in Brazil. A lot of dark religions were brought to Brazil during the time of slave trading. Now, there are many, many different sects and cults that practice sacrifices. In the evening it is not unusual to spot a candle burning on a street corner with a bottle of alcohol (probably Bourbon) near by as a gift to a god. Sometimes you see or hear of animal sacrifices. I have heard of large animals like pigs being sacrificed in the city, but have never witnessed anything.

The following is a series of pictures of a family outing we took yesterday. These pictures were taken about 3 blocks from our house.

Now I want to ask you not to skip ahead and look at the pictures below. Let's make a game of this. Elisa and I are posing in this picture. What caught our attention was actually across the street on the corner. Let's go in for a closer look...

This is the corner I was referring to. You can see that there is definitely something on the curb. Maybe it is trash or a bunch of leaves...

Or maybe it is a sacrifice that was either offered to the false god in the middle of the day or wasn't cleaned up from the night before.

This is a chicken that was sacrificed. It looks as though there is something like cornmeal with it and some other items. It could be that the cloth that the chicken is resting on belonged to the person that left the sacrifice. I don't really know though.

I wanted to share this with you so that you could see what we deal with some of the time. Spiritual Warfare is real and we are engaged in ways that we never imagined 5 years ago. Satan has a grip on a lot of people not just in Brazil, but throughout the world. What do we do to fight against spiritism and acts that don't glorify the true living God? We pray and we arm ourselves with wisdom, integrity, peace, love and joy in Jesus. We don't become numb to what is around us. We reach out to and pray for those who are lost to see and understand the truth of our salvation in Christ. If anything, things like what our family saw yesterday should make us more determined to fight Satan every day with all that we have: physically, mentally and especially spiritually.

"Household gods give worthless advice, fortune-tellers predict only lies, and interpreters of dreams pronounce falsehoods that give no comfort. So my people are wandering like lost sheep; they are attacked because they have no shepherd." Zechariah 10:2