Charles Barnes writes this post for today:

Called to Idaho Falls – Alipio Amaral

From time to time in this email we want to share glimpses of the lives of people God has brought to Idaho Falls, or sent out from Idaho Falls. We do this not to exalt one person or one church over any other, but to rejoice in the ways God has worked in the men and women He sends to our city.

Alipio Amaral came to Idaho Falls last March, and is the discipleship pastor of Watersprings Church. Alipio’s excitement for inductive Bible study is contagious, as is his enthusiasm for ministry in Idaho Falls. You can hear him share much of his testimony in a sermon he preached at Watersprings November 30, 2014, A Life of Impact, available from the webpage http://calvaryif.org/tvMedia/guestSpeakers.php.

Alipio grew up in Hawaii. One day when he was five years old, he was hit by a truck while riding his bicycle. The truck that struck him was going twice the legal speed limit, and sent him flying twenty-five feet in the air. Landing head first into the base of a stop sign, he cracked his head wide open, and bit off his tongue. He was flown inter-Island to the capital city of Honolulu, where at Queens Medical Center he was put on life support. He had slipped into a coma, and his entire right side was paralyzed. His church flew his mother over to the hospital where she commenced a vigil of prayer. The doctors explained to her that Alipio’s worsening condition would render him immobile, inoperable, and incapacitated for the rest of his life, and recommended that she have them pull the plug on the life support equipment. Believing that God had already healed him, his mother told the doctors “no” and waited and prayed for nine days until the night that Alipio woke up. When he awoke, his mother asked him if he remembered anything, to which he confidently responded with his tongue that had grown back, God told me He wants me to tell people how He healed me. He walked out of the hospital two months after he entered, on a Christmas day.

As Alipio continued to grow up in Hawaii, the hedonistic culture of the Islands began to influence him, and he walked away from the Lord. His family life was focused on God, but by high school Alipio had become a rebellious teen. Yet during those teen years God did not forsake him. Alipio was involved in 15 car accidents, some in which he could easily have been killed, and he walked away from every one. The nearness of death in some of these accidents, plus a friend’s remark about his self-centered behavior, brought him to a point of clarity about the direction his life was going, and one day at home, alone, he rededicated his life to the Lord. From that time on, Alipio has had an insatiable desire to understand God’s word, loves to study it and teach others how to study it.

When he was 18, his family moved to southern Oregon. Alipio attended Southern Oregon University for two and a half years, and then Calvary Chapel Bible College in Murrieta, California for a year and a half.  He has skill painting murals, and used that skill to finance trips to Israel and then Austria. In Austria he was taking some training that included a mission trip into Hungary and Serbia, a few months before NATO started bombing the country. When sharing his testimony in a high school in Serbia, he saw how the Lord can work, as every student in six consecutive classes accepted his invitation to receive Christ. Yet what impressed Alipio just as much was the willingness of two Christian teachers in that school who were risking their jobs to allow the gospel to be preached there.

For the next 13 years, Alipio served the Lord in Europe, sharing the gospel, planting churches and starting a Bible college. Most of those years were spent in southern Portugal, and he will tell you that the soil of people’s hearts there is very hard. The Lord also sent a girl, Ashley Carlyle, to Portugal whom Alipio had first met in Hungary, who happened to be from Idaho Falls, and who would later become his wife.

Less than a week after returning to the States in 2010, Alipio was asked by his church to go to Brazil to take charge of a Bible College and Conference Center.  While willing to go wherever God would send him, Alipio wasn’t eager to go to Brazil immediately, and stayed in Oregon a year while Ashley went to Bible College.  Shortly after getting married, Alipio and Ashley went to Brazil, and were there for two years. However in July 2013 when his mother was diagnosed with brain and lung cancer, they returned to the States to take care of her.  His mother passed away on October 14, 2013.

A few months later, God opened the door for Alipio to join the staff of Watersprings.  God is using his love for studying His Word in various groups he’s leading or teaching here.  Also, Alipio is working on preparations for a discipleship school that will start September of 2015.