Story of the Why is this man on a cross tract

The story of the Why is this man on a cross tract is really an amazing testimony to the power of God and how He is at work orchestrating what He wants done to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the Earth.

Bezeuegn Ministries primary mission field is to our Jerusalem (Acts 1:8) right here in North Texas. With that said, our primary mission is taking the Gospel to English speaking people. However, there are parts of the metroplex where people speak Spanish. And there are people in the area who only speak Spanish. Typically we carry Spanish Million Dollar Bill tracts from Living Waters or One Million Tracts to hand to these Spanish speakers that we come in contact with.

Mike and Alma Rios live in the metroplex and are doing ministry with Spanish speakers. They were also planning a mission trip to Mexico. As we are sometimes able to do with mission trips, we agreed to send them with some tracts.

As I prayed about what tracts to get to send with them on the mission trip, the Lord showed me that it was far more economical to develop our own tract. This would also provide us another Spanish resource to use locally. I called Mike and Alma and invited them to pray about the idea of developing a tract. They were excited about the idea. A couple weeks later we meet over lunch to discuss some ideas. At that meeting we came up with three ideas, with this tract being the main one.

Since we all three, obviously, knew English, we wrote the draft of the tract in English over that lunch. We also drafted the God’s Way / Man’s Way tract at that lunch.

Mike’s idea for the tract was to have some Catholic image on the front so that the Spanish speakers, who are mostly Catholic, would connect to the tract and keep it. We tossed around the idea of Mary, but settled on the idea of Christ on the cross. The text on the back connects the dots of why we know that Jesus is not on the cross today!

Alma did the initial translation into Spanish. I sent that text to a couple of people that I knew knew Spanish and got a few comments back. Unfortunately, I was not able to edit the text, because I don’t know any Spanish.

We were at a seeming road block. I spoke to several people who said we could hire a translator. But for our small ministry, hiring someone to do it was not financially practical. Time was ticking until Mike and Alma left on their mission and still we had no final version of the tract.

In February 2010, I flew to Miami for the Super Bowl Outreach. On the plane, I was handing out Million Dollar Bill tracts to everyone as they boarded the plane and passed my seat. The woman who would sit across the aisle from me had a bag that she needed to put in the overhead bin. I got up and helped her put it in there. Somehow in the midst of helping her, I neglected to give her a tract.

Eventually the plan was flying and she and I got to talking. Turns out that she was on her way back to Venezuela. She was raised by missionary parents and had returned to Venezuela as an adult, married a native Spanish speaking man who was also a pastor of a thriving Christin church there. I told her about the Spanish translation project. She said, “I’d be glad to help, and I’ll even have my husband check it!”

WOW!

God came through big. I got her contact information. When I returned home from the trip, I emailed her the text that we were working on. A few days later I had a Spanish translation from her. We sent that off to be printed.

Mike and Alma took about 3,000 of the tracts to Mexico in March 2010 and the tracts were well received there.

We plan to put these tracts into the tract club sometime soon.