Birthday Feast

For Erin's birthday, Elizabeth made a huge feast including homemade tortillas (the best in the world), chicken burritos, salsa, her famous guacamole, some chicken mole, and some beef soup! I was stuffed and Erin seemed to enjoy it. Then we had a tres leche cake that they bought. Phenomenal! We love our family here so much. It is such a blessing to live in community like we do.

We have a group coming down here from Seattle from Calvary Fellowship in Mt. Lake Terrace. We are very excited about that because a lot of groups are cancelling. We have lost two out of the four that we were coordinating and the third is likely going to drop out. The orphanage we work with is also losing groups by the truckload.

Our life is starting to take shape even though we are still in the learning phase. We know that we are investing in the church, and we know that being a part of this community is an important thing. We have loved getting to know more and more people.

We also know that we are trying to be response-able. That is, able to respond...to use the words of Pastor Tom Patterson.

We went to a church leadership meeting on Sunday. They were wondering what we were doing with the youth group. It is a strange thing because we haven't been given any resources or any information as to what we need to do for it. It was at least a nice thing to be a part of the leadership meeting to get an idea of what they were looking to accomplish. As a result, I felt that we needed to recruit some of the people who were at the meeting who might be good at doing youth ministry. We hope to meet with them and begin to train them to serve high school kids. The team would be Sofy, who is in high school, Angelica, Edgar, and Laura. They were excited about this when we asked them to do this.

Our aim is work with them to build relationships with the youth and get them to explore their faith in Christ. Most of the current youth that go to church are from the orphanage. We will have to continue to explore the needs of the community and the resources we have in our ministry and with the church here.

In other news, my parents are coming down here today to visit us from Pheonix. It will be fun to show them around and to spend some time with them.