Tonight, I went to the youth group meeting at PIB Satelite. This is the church that meets at the seminary property, so it’s like 5 minutes from our house. Their youth group has about 80 young people in it, and I have been helping their youth pastor, giving advice on youth ministry. The meeting was good, and I enjoyed watching as an outside observer. This church has great potential to reach a lot of young people in this area, so I’m excited to see what happens in the future. They are also the church with which we’ll be working when the group comes in March.
An interesting thing that happened at the meeting was that I saw this kid that I knew that I had met before. I thought he was someone I knew in Florida. It turns out that it really was the guy I was thinking about. We had played basketball together a lot in the past when I was playing every Thursday with Jaime. Small world. It was really cool to see him again.
Nathan finally decided to stop rolling around on the ground and begin to crawl! It’s amazing how he went from not being able to get up on his hands and knees to being able to crawl in a day. Last night, we were at Tina and Rob’s house, and he decided to go for it a little. It was great. Today, we bought him a new ball, and he crawled all over to get to it.
So far, here are some tentative ministry travel opportunities this year (Click the date to read a preview of the trip):
- May 5-7: Leadership Workshop in Guadalajara with the National Baptist Youth Union
- June 2-17: Classes in Cuba
- June 19-30: Seminary classes in Columbia, SC
- July 22-29: International YMI Summit in Salzburg, Austria
- August 4-6: Latin American Youth Specialties Youth Workers Convention in Guatemala
- September 15-17: Leadership Workshop in Taumalipas with the National Baptist Youth Union
- September 26-28: Latin Summit in Quito, Ecuador
This is a huge list of opportunities, all of which are extremely important. I’ll explain each one of them and their importance later. The important thing is that you begin praying for these opportunities. We really need to be present at each one of them, but we are waiting on God to tell us which ones are going to no longer be tentative.
The real issues are finances and timing. If we are able to raise enough funds to pay for all of these trips, we will work our schedules around them. That is how important they are to the ministry here in Latin America. If you want to contribute to the trips, please contact me.
I have purposely left off a few other opportunities because I see these as necessary. The others would just be beneficial, but they are not necessary. There is such a need to network and recruit here. Please pray for us as we need wisdom to manage our time given the many opportunities that there are.
Fellowship: I didn’t take the time to look up the Greek word, but I’m pretty sure there are some good clues to the meaning of the word if we take a look at the Spanish word for fellowship: “Convivir.” Literally, this means “to live with.” It seems to me to be a special time of spending time together, hanging out, sharing your life with someone else.
We hosted a fellowship for missionaries last night at our house. It was a good time of fun for most, but something made me think that most of the time, we don’t want to spend time with each other. We’d rather be at home watching TV, reading a book, watching videos on the Internet, or reading blogs. It’s funny how we say we are going to fellowship when really, we don’t care about spending time with others.
I had a great time, and I enjoyed getting to know some of the other missionaries better. I just hope they did, too. As an added bonus, we cleaned up our house really well in order to have the fellowship.
