When Worlds Collide

Rio Coco Sunset  Nicaragua/Honduras

We go through days of living in this world, enjoying moments with family and friends, dealing with problems, and getting caught up in the events around us. This is life in our natural world. Then out of the blue, we collide with another world and something special happens.

God often surprises us in the middle of mundane events. For me, today is just another warm morning here in Waspam, Rio Coco  Nicaragua. Over the past three decades, I have experienced many similar sunrises, the same early conversations between the chickens, cows, pigs, parrots, and dogs, and the feeling of tranquility that goes with a fourth-world environment. Often, as these warm mornings turned into hot days, I have seen God do some incredible things. I have learned that He likes to show up in places such as this.

 I live for those days when my natural world collides with His spiritual world.

Waspam is the largest “city” on the Rio Coco, the longest river in Central America and the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. The Coco River is the main highway through the center of Miskitia, the region on the Atlantic Coast side of Honduras and Nicaragua, where the Miskito Indians live. Christianity first came to this river valley only eighty years ago. One of the first pastors to establish a church on the river was Ryker Watson, the father of my friend and fellow aviator Barry Watson. The Miskitos rapidly accepted Christianity and mixed Christian beliefs into their already-developed spiritual belief system. The spiritual world has always been very real here in Miskitia. Jesus became just another face in the heavens, another force to deal with. Hopefully, He would help the Miskitos where other spirits have harmed and taken from them.

I came here in 1984 with a relief team to help Miskitos who were refugees from the Contra-Sandinista war in Nicaragua and had fled across the border into the swamps and savannahs of Eastern Honduras. Over 104 communities along the Coco River had been destroyed by Sandinista, Cuban, Bulgarian and Russian troops in 1981-83. Homes were burned, fruit trees cut, cattle killed and many died. Over 60,000 refugees were living in very rustic communities along the Kruta River and Honduran side of the Coco, and in refugee villages along the Patuca River. Food and drinking water was an issue and infant mortality rates were high.

Truman, Mirna and Michael 

Auka Honduras 1985

 In 1986, we began a primary school project in these villages along the lower Coco River. We also began teaching the students, as well as the adults, about relational Christianity¾a personal relationship with God. As we taught the basics of our Christian beliefs, we ourselves began to learn some fundamentals of cross-cultural communication.

In 1997, we took three of our Miskito leaders of the school project to Israel for a study course on the life of Jesus. How we got there is one of those God-really-surprises-us things. It all began with a desire of our project director Truman Cunningham to see the land that Jesus lived in since nobody from the Miskito culture had ever been to the Holy Land. He told me this on one bug-infested night, sitting on his porch, down river in Sawa. I was surprised to hear this from Truman, as I took wanted to experience walking in the land of the Bible.  Suddenly in the spring of 1997, after a few years of prayer, four different friends in Hawaii in less than a week, gave us money for airfare and traveling expenses. A few weeks later, a friend in Jerusalem provided us with a rent-free apartment for two months. Another friend sent us $5000 for “whatever else we needed.” What he sent was almost exactly the cost of a course of study called The Life of Jesus offered by Christian Travel Study Programs.

 Our teacher was archeologist/Bible scholar, Dr. Randall Smith, who turned out to be one of the most noted experts on Biblical culture and history in Israel. During our twelve-day study tour, Randy communicated to our “three amigos” (Truman, Augusto, and Onofre) and us much of the background of the Bible. Along with this, he taught us what many of the Jews were thinking when they heard Jesus teach. As I verbally translated from English into Spanish for this course, I began appreciating the fact that these three believers from a culture where Christianity was relatively new were literally bypassing centuries of theology and Western interpretation of the Scriptures. They were right where those first-century believers were, sitting in the same places, listening with culturally-attuned ears to the message that Jesus was communicating within the context of first-century culture and language.

It dawned on me that these three Miskito men were beginning their spiritual walk right where those first disciples began. I didn’t have to explain systems of theology, discuss heresies and other controversies that have sprung up over the centuries, or explain the Bible through my own American cultural heritage. These guys were getting the message straight from the first-century Jewish and Greek cultures right into their own Miskito culture.

What a concept! It was revolutionary! The Bible became alive to these three Miskito Indians, and they returned to their homeland much better able to communicate the essence of Christ’s message.

Since then, Dr. Smith and I have had many discussions on the challenges facing our own culture to understand the message of the Bible and apply biblical truths to our own lives. We both realized that the key to any understanding of the Bible is an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit. He is the one who makes the Bible come alive, who makes the words jump off the page into our lives. Having worked with third- and fourth-world cultures, we are well aware of the powerful effect that the Bible has on any person who reads it. Without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, history has proven that intellectual pursuits of Biblical understanding are in vain.

One of Randy’s favorite stories is of the two Chinese women whom he had on one of his Life of Jesus study tours in Israel. These ladies became Christians in the underground church in China, and the only “Bible” they had was the first two chapters of Philippians. Because of their relationship with the Holy Spirit, these two chapters gave them the guidance they needed to live a life pleasing and useful to God. Imagine their surprise when they discovered there were two more chapters to Philippians! Later on when they discovered that there were sixty-five more books in the Bible, they were overjoyed. When they walked in the footsteps of Jesus in Israel and began to understand the cultural, historical, political, and geographical background of the Bible, the message of the Scriptures became richer still.

This is our goal for Living in the Spiritual World, to open up the richness of the Scriptures as well as to provide a basis for accurately understanding the intended message of the writers.

In the summer of 1999, we began a project together to communicate first-century Christian cultural understanding to our own first world churches, as well as to other Christians around the world. Since then we have been compiling notes; recording conversations; taking photographs; filming on location in Israel, Greece, Nicaragua, Italy and in the Caribbean; and organizing the material presented in the following pages. All of the photos included are from these trips.

Much of this material is available in videos online and through our books that we have published since then, as well as Randy’s channel on YouTube “One Hour, One Book.”

Much of what follow flows from a five-hour spontaneous conversation that was recorded at the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem on Sept 14, 1999. We hope that you will find our somewhat unorthodox roundtable presentation engaging and easy to assimilate.

Most of us have learned how to live in our natural world though our own education and life experiences. The most important challenge of our lives is the understanding of how we are to live in the spiritual world. We hope that Living in the Spiritual World will help you live a rich, satisfying, and productive life here in this world and the next.

Michael Bagby 

Vero Beach 2025

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