Even In Trials All Is Not Lost

Recently, SLM was blessed to have one of our area pastors speak in chapel. Pastor Butch Lee has been quite involved in missions through SLM, Neighborhood Gospel Missions, and through mission trips at his church, Sandy Creek Baptist Church, here in Madison, Georgia. After swapping SLM stories, Pastor Butch told me he had an interesting one to share of his own from a mission trip to San Marcos de Colon, Honduras, in July, 1995, where the missionaries shared with him the following story, which was then verified by new SLM board member, Darwin Blandon, who grew up involved in the ministry affected.

“In late 1978, during the Nicaraguan civil war, Missionary Bob Tyson and associates with Good Samaritan Baptist Mission, were forced to leave their mission building in Condega, Nicaragua. They made a hasty departure leaving behind copies of SLM lessons which they were unable to carry out. 

The Sandinistas (Rebels) took over the building as a military headquarters. The soldiers, looking for something to do, began reading and completing the lessons which were left behind. They began to mail the completed lessons to the mission headquarters across the border in Honduras. Completed lessons and testimonies of students’ salvation experiences were received for several years thereafter.”

When those missionaries left their belongings behind, they could have never imagined that God would use them to change the lives of those soldiers. Praise God that in spite of the hardest challenges this world brings, all is not lost, He is always there.