One evening while I was in Ecuador a couple of weeks ago, I found myself at a “wake” for an elderly church member who had died the day before.  People from the church and community gather at the home of the deceased where might be a Bible message and a time of sharing along with a meal at some point. They will be there late into the night and generally, everyone sits silently. I broke protocol and I began to introduce myself and converse with the folks around me with hope of striking a gospel conversation.  As it turns out, an elderly man sitting near me was the pastor of a church that meets in a little building high up on the side of a mountain eight or ten miles by road away.  As we talked, he began to share the story of how He came to Christ.  

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His salvation story began with a lost pig.  His story unfolded 60 years ago when these communities were very rural and everyone was very poor.  He was about 19 or 20 and someone had given him a pig.  One day, his pig got loose, and they travelled all over the community looking for it but could not find it. He went to the local radio station to see if they would make an announcement about the lost pig in hopes that the community could help him find it.  The problem they had is that they didn’t have a radio and they wanted to be able to hear the announcement.  As it turned out, they met someone who had a radio that they wanted to sell and for a small price he purchased the radio.  The pig was found and they continued to listen to the radio and eventually stumbled upon a station that broadcasted Bible Preaching in his mother tongue, Highland Quichua, for an hour or two a week.  As he listened, he began to hunger to understand the message he was hearing and so he decided to travel the several hours to Quito in an effort to find someone who could tell him how to be saved.  He did find the radio station and there he found someone to lead him to Christ.   

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               The folks at HCJB connected him to other believers and he began to grow in his faith.  As people in the community learned that he had become a believer they began to persecute him.  Over the next period of time, he was beaten for his faith. His home was attacked, and his livestock was killed. Eventually, his fiercest opponent turned to Christ and was saved and that led to a movement of God in the community.  A church was started and over time this pastor moved to the Canton of Sigchos where he started the church in an unreached community on the side of a mountain where he continues to serve Christ even in his old age.  This story reminds me the importance of sowing the seed any way we can and wherever we can.  God used donors and volunteers to make a radio broadcast possible.  He used faithful men and women to make discipleship possible. He certainly used the prayers of the saints to open hearts in unreached places and connect them to the message of the gospel.