Colombia Journey

Charlotte and I are traveling in Colombia this week. Our first stop was in Bogota, a city of eight million people.

Bogota is located in the Andes mountain at an altitude of 8,000 feet. This picture was taken from Monserrat, a park on a mountain with a great view of the city.
On top of the mountain is a beautiful Catholic church that is still decorated for the Christmas season.

This journey includes retracing some of my roots. I first moved to Bogota with my family when I was six months old. My parents were missionaries in South America for thirty six years. My dad started the Iglesia Bautista Central (pictured above). They started meeting in a room over a bar. In time the bar went out of business but the church thrived. Today, the church is surrounded by high rise buildings and has no parking space.

On the wall, inside the building is a picture of the building as it looked when my family left Bogota to move to Barranquilla a city on the northern coast of Colombia.

Inside the building looks much as it did fifty years ago. The organ in the choir loft on the right looks like the organ my mother played when we were there.

The Colegio Nueva Granada is the school I attended during my kindergarten year. The curriculum is all in English. Today it is considered one of the best schools in the city.

It has been good to reconnect with my Colombian roots. I am thankful for the heritage I have from growing up in this environment. I have some wonderful memories from this period of my life. I am also keenly aware of the legacy that my parents left behind. It also makes me wonder about the legacy I will leave behind some day. I am reminded of a line in a song we used to hear, "May those who come behind us find us faithful."

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off every thing that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us." Hebrew 12: 1