AMAZON ADVENTURES

CARL’S BOOK

Over one thousand native Shipibo Indians and mestizos (mixed blood) all gathered in one village for three days and nights, camping around campfires, singing until all hours of the early morning, and joining together in health seminars and evangelistic services. Native Indian youth competed in a folkloric Christian music and dance contest, the winners to receive musical instruments upon my next visit. Some anthologists from Europe came along and were impressed that we did NOT try to change the Indian culture and music, but allowed them to express their faith through it. We had traveled about 3 hours by boat on the Ucayali River, which is one of the “headwater” source rivers for the mighty Amazon, and then had to walk about an hour from the main river along a smaller tributary to the "county seat" of Iparia. My team of 13 persons, five being young surfers from New Smyrna Beach, Florida where my mission was based, ventured into the jungle areas formerly controlled by the terrorist group, translated “the Shining Path”. We were welcomed royally into the town by groups of singing natives in full Shipibo Indian costumes, as if we were a delegation visiting with the President of the country. After years of preparing the groundwork, the mission base, and shipments of equipment and medical supplies to Peru, I finally realized my dream for God’s “ABBA Mission” to actually go forth out into the deep jungle.

The service was a typical “missionary service”, complete with slides, flags, native dress and items of interest, and—oh, by the way—the “missionary call”. I was only 13 years old in that service thirty years earlier, and I remember several such services, as common occurrences—all ending the same way—asking if anyone who was willing to follow God’s call to missions anywhere in the world would please come forward and make that dedication.

I had yielded my life completely, and had accepted Jesus as my Savior, two years earlier in a service in that same Pentecostal Church on September 18, 1966 at the age of 11. I knew that I was truly “born again” because I had had a real encounter with our wonderful Lord Jesus!
Life began for me on that day. When my Mom asked me if I wanted to go forward at the end of the service, which featured former drug addict turned evangelist, Bobby Black, I shrugged my shoulders. She turned to ask my sister and WHAM, the Holy Spirit of God touched me and turned me inside out! I started bawling my eyes out, and could only think of getting to that altar post haste!

I had been dramatically “saved” in the balcony of the First Pentecostal Church of New Castle, Pennsylvania—the same building in which, sixteen years later, I would begin my evangelistic youth outreach to the poor in that run-down neighborhood. I would first answer my “mission call” to the streets of the small city where I was born, before heading into the headwaters of the mighty Amazon River in Peru 10 years later.

Everything before that time was a cloudy dream. It was if I had been simply existing before that day. After that encounter with the our living Lord, I remember looking at the flowering shrubs in our neighbor’s yard after church, and the sunshine and the grass, and it was like everything was brand new—like I had never seen it before so clearly and alive.

The dedication to serve God in missions was for me, “a given”. If my God, who had so loved the world (and me) would give His only Son so that I could live forever with Him, then my dedication to “go anywhere and do anything for Him” was a natural step. I, of course—having gained a profound knowledge of spiritual things at such a tender age, saw my future ministry career as a “teacher of the deeper things of God”, and maybe to be a Pastor with a wife and family, not a "single" foreign missionary.

This is the first draft of the opening of my autobiography (now in the writing process), filled with true stories of my life and travels, and amazing miracles in the Amazon Basin of Peru and in the U.S.

Send mail to carl@abbaperu.org with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 2006 Amazon Basin Benevolent Association