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Brazil

1979, 1987-88

In 1979 I took the cross on the Amazon River through Brazil. The Amazon River is one of the great wonders of the world. It is longer than the next seven largest rivers of the world put together. The Mississippi, the Congo, the Nile, the Ganges, all could fit inside the Amazon. The volume of water is so much that 400 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean you can still drink the water.

From Iquitos, Peru, to the mouth of the Amazon is almost 4,000 miles, yet the almost flat river drops only about 400 feet in that distance. Ocean going ships can navigate all the way to Iquitos, three-quarters of the way across the South American Continent. Most of the boats that travel the Amazon, however, are local. They are long and narrow. This is the transportation system in place of roads. The boats carry people, cows, pigs, coconuts, bananas… everything imaginable.

There are thousands of birds of every kind, huge fish weighing up to 500 pounds, and villages dot the riverbank here and there.

Brazil5I felt led by the Lord to take the cross down the great flowing river. I flew into Iquitos with my daughter, Gina and friend, Mike Ooten. We bought a boat for $1,000 that would carry 150 passengers from some Indians. We converted the inside so that four people could sleep. It was complete with mosquito net, a stove, and two 12 hp motors that we purchased in Iquitos. The boat was 55 feet long and 12 feet wide. The registered name was “Recieo” but we called it “The Holy Floater.” The following are a few excerpts about this trip from my diary.

We mounted the cross on the front of the boat, and then I would take it off and carry it around the river villages, give out gospel material, preach, and then move on to the next village by way of the boat. I always had a local guide because the river is so big with so many lakes that you can get lost for days. Also, you need someone who knew where the villages were. The guide would also serve as interpreter. For the story of the start of the Amazon cross walk and the trip to Leticia please click on the nation of Peru!

Leticia, Columbia just across from Brazil: We got a hotel room overlooking the Amazon. As the sun sets over the river, it is one of the most beautiful colors I have ever seen. Mike, Gina and I began to sing, “From the rising of the sun unto the going down, the Lord’s name is to be praised.” We began to dance in the spirit as David danced before the Lord. We were crying, laughing, dancing, singing and praying. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life.

I returned to the United States to take Gina back and to bring Joy and Joshua, two more of my children with me. Joshua was 8 and Joy was 9. Mike remained behind with the boat on the Amazon.

We had two 55-gallon drums of gasoline for fuel on our boat, but we needed to get one more as we had almost run out of fuel on the way to Leticia. Mike had bought a third drum and they were all in the rear of the boat. When I returned, the smell of gasoline was strong in the enclosed boat. We cooked supper over the open flame of the kerosene stove, and then went to sleep. But the next morning, I said, “Mike, gasoline has spilled in this boat. The smell is so strong.”

I went to the back where the drums were and tapped on the sides of them and two of them sounded with a thud… they were full. The third one rang hollow. My heart almost stopped. “Where is the gasoline, Mike, this one is empty!

I raised one of the boards that covered the floor and there, underneath us, inside the boat, under the open flame stove, were 55 gallons of sloshing explosive gasoline. I told Joy and Joshua to go to the river bank and Mike and I began pouring the gasoline into the Amazon River. Soon a film of gasoline on the water surrounded us.

As a boat came by we prayed, trusting that no one would throw a cigarette into the Amazon River, igniting a horrendous explosion. Only God had protected us! An explosion in the boat would have blown us to bits, killing us all. Mike had cooked with a gas flame over that trapped gas for three weeks!

Joshua wanted to bring his skateboard with him. I protested that there was no place to ride a skateboard along the Amazon River, but he insisted and finally I gave in, but considered it a worthless extra burden for us.

We had record players that are little cardboard folders with a needle that you fold three times and they stand up. You can take a pencil or a stick and turn it around and play the record. It doesn’t use batteries. A lot of the local people don’t have money for batteries and couldn’t buy them if they did, but they can play these records. All you have to do is have someone spin them around. We had records in different tribal languages, plus Spanish and Portuguese. Whenever we went into a village we would leave a Bible, gospel material in Spanish or Portuguese, then we’d leave Jesus stickers and records. Some records would preach the gospel about Jesus. Others would give basic doctrines so a person would have a fairly good understanding of what was going on just by listening. It didn’t matter if someone could read or not.

We arrived at a primitive village, tied up the boat and walked up. When we got there everybody ran away. We couldn’t make contact with the people. Suddenly the Lord gave me an idea. There was a high bank, like a hill, and it went all the way down to the Amazon where we were moored. The idea was for Joshua to get his skateboard and skateboard down that hill. He said, “No, daddy, I can’t skate down that.”

We had record players that are little cardboard folders with a needle that you fold three times and they stand up. You can take a pencil or a stick and turn it around and play the record. It doesn’t use batteries. A lot of the local people don’t have money for batteries and couldn’t buy them if they did, but they can play these records. All you have to do is have someone spin them around. We had records in different tribal languages, plus Spanish and Portuguese. Whenever we went into a village we would leave a Bible, gospel material in Spanish or Portuguese, then we’d leave Jesus stickers and records. Some records would preach the gospel about Jesus. Others would give basic doctrines so a person would have a fairly good understanding of what was going on just by listening. It didn’t matter if someone could read or not.

We arrived at a primitive village, tied up the boat and walked up. When we got there everybody ran away. We couldn’t make contact with the people. Suddenly the Lord gave me an idea. There was a high bank, like a hill, and it went all the way down to the Amazon where we were moored. The idea was for Joshua to get his skateboard and skateboard down that hill. He said, “No, daddy, I can’t skate down that.”

Arthur with the cardboard record player

The record player

Brazil12“Record player, Joshua,” I said. “Go get your skateboard. You brought it, so let’s put it to work.”

He got it and we stood on top of the hill. I said, “Joshua, skateboard.” “Dad,” he answered, “It’s too steep!” I won’t be able to stop!” I said, “Joshua, quit making excuses. Skateboard! I’ve got a feeling it’s going to draw a crowd.”

Joshua got on his skateboard and I said, “Get down the hill.”

He kind of stepped on it and it started gaining speed. Then I realized it was too steep. He couldn’t control it. He couldn’t stop. There was nothing to stop it and I realized he was going to crash.

As the people that were away from us along the edge saw a little boy riding a board, they had never seen anything like it before in their lives, they forgot about us being strangers. They came running out of the bushes where they were hidden. They were hollering and hollering, just like at a football match. As Joshua was going down the hill he yelled, “Dad, I’ve got to jump!” He was going right into the boat. He jumped off and went rolling. His skateboard crashed into the boat and Joshua stopped, just at the water’s edge! All the people grabbed him. They were helping him up… they were his friends all around him! Joshua took the record player and began to play the record with a pin. The crowd listened and we were able to reach that village because Joshua brought his skateboard to the Amazon.

If God can use a skateboard, He can use anything!

Joy got sick and she was so hot and feverish. We prayed for her to be healed but the Lord didn’t heal her immediately, so we had to take that precious nine-year-old girl, who became almost incoherent with fever, and dip her down into the Amazon to cool her off.

Ordinarily we used just one motor going downstream but we had to turn on both motors, for I thought she was going to die. It was a day and a half before we could get to a doctor. It was so sad. She just lay there moaning, and I would wet a rag and put it on her. We finally got to a place where there was a doctor. The office was dirty, there were syringes lying around everywhere, flies, mosquitoes and filth. This doctor gave her a shot and some pills, and after a little while she started getting better. She still had fever, but was doing better. A few days later it flared up again. We got her to another doctor. When we got to Manaus, Brazil, which is a big city with over a million people, we stayed there a few days and she got sick again, running an extremely high fever. This is when we left the Amazon.

Mike Ooten, Joy, Joshua and Arthur swimming in the Amazon River

Joy and Joshua with dad

When we returned to the United States we found out she had an infection and it took several months for her to get well.

Mike Ooten, Joy, Joshua and Arthur swimming in the Amazon River
Joy and Joshua with dad

We gave the boat and all of the supplies to the poor in Manaus, Brazil. Hallelujah!

Sao Paulo
December 1987

Praise the Lord. This is the day Glory came – the very Glory of God. I was with Bill and Ken Henderson, Paul Fabian and Brother Alcajar, a Brazilian evangelist, who lives in Sao Paulo. We had an absolutely wonderful walk as we carried the cross through the streets of Sao Paulo. Paul Fabian walked with me and we had a great time of witness.

Sao Paulo is one the largest cities in the world and it is jammed with people. People, people, people in apartment buildings, people in the streets, everywhere there are people. We were having a rally in a park right in the very center of downtown with flatbed truck. This was a pure street rally with bands and everything. There had been no promotion by any churches, except a small group of Christians.

I put the cross on the front of the stage and the band began to play music. Instantly, crowds began to gather. Hundreds, then thousands, then thousands and thousands more gathered. Bill and Ken Henderson are physically strong men and their main attraction is that they break handcuffs, blow up hot water bottles, lift weights – do other similar physical feats. They began to do some of these feats and as the crowd was watching, there just seemed to be an awesome descending of the Glory of God that began to move upon the place. I stepped up to give a brief message as I was going to preach later. As I looked down at the audience I saw a man that we had led to Jesus as I carried the cross through the streets of the city earlier in the day.

I leaned over the platform rail to shake his hand and to acknowledge that I saw him. When I shook his hand a lady grabbed hold of my arm and was pulling me down and since I was on the platform I had to hang onto it. I almost went over head first. I tried to ask what she wanted and I called for someone to come and interpret for me. She was asking me to pray for her, she wanted to be healed. She nearly had a death-grip on me, so finally I just hopped down and prayed for her and she was instantly and gloriously healed. When people saw her healed they headed up and wanted to be prayed for too.

During this time the band started playing and I was down in the crowd praying with people. One after another people were being healed. When Ken and Bill realized what was happening, they got down in the audience too and began to pray with people. There was an outpouring of healing that just went on and on. There would be waves of shouting and glory as one person was healed and then there would be another shout and glory and hallelujah and somebody else would be healed. Yet, no one had even preached a message. I finally shared a word about salvation and then Ken shared just a word about salvation and people were saved. But during that time no one ever brought a solid message. It was the most incredible healings. Finally I felt led to announce on the platform that crippled people come up to me. Paul Fabian was filming this with his television camera and it was holy glorious chaos.

I saw every person I prayed for healed except one person, whose crippling I would say was 75 percent healed. I saw amazing things as people with crippled legs, with crippled bent arms being healed. It was much like all the healings in India and some of the other places all rolled into one several hour period. I didn’t know that this was going to happen, none of us had expected it, but it was going to be an evangelistic rally of preaching and God just came down in sovereign glory. We had a flight to catch about 10 or 11:00 p.m. that night, but we stayed at the park hour after hour and just let our flight leave without us. We couldn’t leave this crowd of people and so the praying for the people and the healings went on through most of the night. Finally late in the night, we got on a bus from Evangelist Alcajar’s ministry and we rode all through the night from San Paulo to Rio to be there in time for a great rally that we were having at Coca Cabana Beach on New Year Eve’s night.

Brazil21Today we carried the cross through a poor borough of Rio de Janeiro called Rocinka. Joy, my daughter arrived so she could be there during the time in Rio. She and about eight other followers of Jesus including Ken and Bill carried the cross through the worst borough in Rio. It was just wonderful. The local believers that knew and were coordinating our time were afraid for us to carry the cross through the area. They said it was too dangerous, the people are criminals and they will attack and beat you up, rob you or kill you. But it was just a marvelous time and people were saved everywhere. We preached and sang in the streets. A key member of one of the gangs in the area was converted and then began preaching in the streets. It was just a marvelous time of witness and that in one of the most needy areas in the world.

New Year’s Eve night at Coca Cabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro had to be one of the greatest times of my entire life . There were approximately two million people on the sand all along the Coca Cabana Beach. This is the New Year’s Eve night, which is different from the carnival that takes place a couple months later in the year. New Years Eve night is a carnival spirit but also a very religious night where all of the voodoo, sex and witch doctors and spiritual religions gather along the beach. They bring all kind of gifts to put into little boats that they push out into the water at midnight, they burn incense and have flowers and chants and it is a very pagan type atmosphere. This was one of the first major coordinated efforts to actually evangelize and be a witness for Christ on the beach.

The Christians had constructed two huge platforms like at a rock concert in the heart of the beach area, separated far enough apart so that the loud speakers would not interfere with each other, but between the two platforms and the gigantic PA systems a great portion of the beach was covered with the sounds from the stage both speaking and singing. There were about 30,000 followers of Jesus, organized by churches, who had come to witness, but there was no place on the beach to gather all the these believers because they were all mixed in with all the other people. But it was a tremendous, tremendous witness of all these people sharing Christ. There was music on the stages and at about 10:00 at night, we began to march from the platform to make a big circle around the beach.

There was just no way to estimate how many people walked with us because it was a solid wall of people. Estimated at two million. When you start trying to march through two million people, before long the marchers mixed in with the people going back and forth along the beach. The cross was carried and Ken and Bill Henderson, Joy, Paul Fabian were there, Alcajar was there and a small group surrounded the cross and the others followed behind us. It was one of the wildest scenes that I’ve ever marched through in all my life. There were nearly naked people, there were people dancing, people burning incense, people chanting, people doing pagan rituals, there were Christians praying and shouting and there were bands and balloons. It was the biggest mixture of everything that you could ever imagine to see or hear. It was hot as people were completely pressed around us.

As we walked one of the national television networks that were broadcasting live to all of Brazil came up and we did a live message of Christ and it was broadcast to the nation of Brazil. Another television network that covers all of Brazil also filmed a program that was shown the next day. All of the major newspapers were out there, it was just a one night witness to the entire nation of Brazil that Jesus Christ was alive and that Christians were there and carrying the cross and seeking to share the good news of Jesus. We went down the beach and then finally came back in a circle. When we returned, we moved out toward the water’s edge rather than along the sidewalk edge as we had gone down the beach.

Praying with people to receive Jesus as Savior and Lord. As we moved along where the water was coming in, a huge crowd of thousands and thousands of people were walking with us. Once this motion of people started moving it just became a tidal wave of people. I was being very careful not to intrude in the places where the different spiritualist religions were having their little gatherings with candles, incense and chants. But the crowd many times just surged over these groups because no one could stop the momentum. It became a momentum like a landslide that couldn’t be stopped. As we moved along the beach we were shouting Jesus slogans in Portuguese. All of a sudden there was a huge wave. It just rolled in from the sea. It was about fifteen minutes or so before midnight as the wave washed over us. It picked our feet up off the ground, and we were struggling to keep our balance. The cross almost completely got away from me and then when the wave came back, the undertow almost washed everybody out to sea. No other waves were like this huge one; it was just one massive wave. The next morning, we read in the newspaper that the night before, shortly before midnight, one of the large carnival boats that was out with people partying had been overturned by a massive wave. I forget now, but I believe a hundred or more people were drowned. It must have been the same wave that hit us. It was unbelievable.

We went back to the platform, arriving there just before midnight. We had planned to be preaching and to share the message of Jesus Christ right at midnight, but we realized that just as midnight began to approach it was impossible because the sky exploded in rockets and flares. It was simply awesome. It was like China. I experienced two massive New Year’s celebrations this year, the New Years Eve and the Chinese New Year and both were explosive. After the midnight screaming and rockets began to calm down, the Henderson brothers broke handcuffs, blew up hot water bottles and they spoke and then I preached. It was awesome because there is no way to know how many people heard the message of Jesus Christ because all through the night there was singing and then someone would testify or share about Christ, and then preaching and singing and preaching and you couldn’t really give an invitation for people to come forward because everybody was forward. They were forward and backwards, and front, behind and everywhere, all you could do was just say that there were gospel materials. The followers of Jesus were walking through the crowds throwing handfuls of gospel tracks into the air and people were grabbing them. We estimated that night, between the two stages and the two huge PA systems with eighteen huge speakers each, we preached to at least a million people. Everybody agreed that at least half the people heard some of the preaching because you couldn’t miss it, it was loud and it covered half the beach. But as far as the eye could see, people listening, some people moving, walking, some people standing and listening. It was an awesome night.

This was the time when some Brazilians worship the goddess of the sea. They push little boats filled with flowers out into the water and if their flowers and boats make it out to sea, then the sea goddess has heard their prayers. If it washes back on shore then their prayers weren’t heard and they need to do something else. We stayed out on the beach in constant rallies until about 5:00 a.m., then we carried the cross back to the hotel.

I neglected to mention that there was a huge lighted balloon, about 60 feet around, saying “ New Year’s with Christ’ . All the two million people that had gathered along the beach certainly could see it. The awesome glory of the night just had to be one of the greatest of witness that I’ve ever experienced. We returned to the hotel with all the team that was staying there. The arrogant security guards would not allow the cross to be brought back into the storage room at the hotel. Rev. Alcajar went to the hotel manager and talked with him and they just treated us like criminals because we had the cross. The name of the hotel is the Le Meridian Hotel, and it was definitely the nastiest hotel that I have ever stayed in toward the cross. This was a most glorious and humbling night, preaching to approximately one million people and then having the hotel refuse to allow the cross to be brought into the baggage room.

What a glorious time in on this trip and cross walk in Brazil.

Pilgrim followers of Jesus,

Arthur and Denise Blessitt
Luke 18:1