Jon and Angela Button Just another weblog 
During our one year language course the University offers two class trips. The first one was guided by a professor of geology.
Students in the higher level language courses take classes in other subjects and this trip was a traveling classroom for them . For the rest of us, it was a chance to see more of Portugal and practice Portuguese. If any of you has ever been on a guided tour before, you know what it is like to try and gather around the guide and try and listen to what he is explaining. Now imagine what it was like for me with only 4 months of Portuguese under my belt- trying to listen to someone explain things like, placas tectônicas, litósfera, altiplano, and cordilheiras marginais.
I most likely do not understand these terms in English, so I had to laugh to myself whenever we stopped at a wonderful view or interesting rock and our guide would start to explain what we were looking at.
Please keep us in prayer as we make relationships and come in contact with many people here who do not believe in God. The professor made several references to evolution and was quite aggressively agnostic. One evening as we were having dinner, he went around the table, asking each person if they believe in God. Of course I said yes. He went on to ask, without giving me a chance to respond, how could a rock that is 382 million years old that was dated using "actual" scientific methods could be explained. Of course, his "actual" scientific methods are based on a dating system that can’t be measured since we weren’t there. The following day he made a comment about some rock formations that “were definitely not made by God” (he just happened to switch to English to make this comment, just to make sure everyone understood).
These were good reminders that the people around me don’t know God and I have the opportunity to be His ambassador to them while I here. I have the amazing advantage of having relationships where I can share God’s Word and His plan for mankind. Please pray for us.
