| 18 February 2010
I had just arrived in the little town of Iquipí in the upper Ocoña Valley. One of my first visits there was to Modesta and Hernán who had a two month old son, their only son after 15 years of marriage. As you can imagine, this son was the apple of their eye.
This is the story that Modesta told me: “I was attending in the store which is the front room of our house. The baby was on our big bed in the bedroom behind the store.
All at once I heard a crash in the bedroom, and ran to see what had happened. There was a big hole in the roof and also a horse that was thrashing around, trying to get its legs untangled from the matress and the bed. Its legs had gone completely through the matress and the bed.
The debrís from the reed and mud roof was all over the place. The roof beams were broken. The baby was untouched, still lying at the head of the bed. How we thank the Lord for sparing our son.”
Again, this is one of the many manifestations of the goodness of the Lord to us. I encouraged Modesta and Hernán to raise their child in the fear of the Lord, which of course they agreed to do.
In times of crisis, and especially after having seen the mercies of the Lord, it is easy to make promises. But especially in this of raising godly children, one needs that constancy, day after day and year after year, of training them in the ways of the Lord.
But are you wondering how that flying horse landed on the roof of that house? The Neyra’s house is up against the side of that steep and narrow valley. A neighbor of theirs was trying to catch his horse, and it was fleeing capture rather than flying. The horse mistook the mud roof of the house in that dry valley for the rest of the mountainside, and thus ended up flying into bed.
