By Missionary to Bolivia, Kevin White

When we started our first church here in Bolivia, we used English classes to try to make contact with as many people as possible and invite them to church. From those English classes, we had forty or so people that started coming to our first services.

One of those families was the Arancibia family. Within the first few weeks, the whole family had made professions of faith. Well, not too long afterwards, the wife’s parents began to come and her father, César, got saved. They were a great family in the church, and he even started helping as an usher.

A couple of years later, we were preparing for our furlough and wanted to go by to visit with this family one last time before we left. At the end of the visit, I returned to my car and was about to leave when César came out to the car and tapped on my window. When I rolled the window down, he said he wanted to tell me something before I left. He began to tell me that, when he was younger, he was a pilot, and on one of his trips they got into a terrible thunderstorm. He said that the plane was getting tossed all over the place as they did everything possible to keep it in the air. At one point, it got so bad that the other pilot told him that if he needed to do anything to prepare for the end, that then would be the time to do it. He told me that at that very moment it was as if the clouds opened and they could see the sun shining brightly through the opening. They were able to fly the plane toward that small window of hope and made it out of the storm alive.

As he stood by my car telling me this story, there were tears streaming down his face. He told me that for all those years he never understood why God had spared his life until he met us. He said that he realized that God spared his life so that he could hear the gospel and be saved. It was a great joy to see the mercy of the Lord, and that we were able to have a part in taking the gospel to César and his family. A couple of months later, while on furlough, I got word that César had passed away from cancer. All I could think about was his taking that last flight and seeing his Savior face to face for the first time.